Hi friends
Maximum transparency again this week! Everyone is opening up! It’s very exciting.
This is a fascinating interview for several reasons. The main thing that strikes me is that despite making the lowest salary of anyone I’ve yet interviewed, this person is also, by a considerable margin, the most content with their lot.
I’m not a psychologist, but I would guess this is because this person seems to feel as if they have control over their career and circumstances. They also seem to feel they have made good choices, and are making a difference to something they care about.
We often read that income correlates with happiness and life satisfaction to a limited degree only. One’s happiness increases with income up to a certain (relatively modest) point and then it levels off. And yet, many of us still pursue more and more money. Why?
the meaning of life
Because we are obsessed with status. Those same studies usually also make the point that while more money doesn’t necessarily make one happier, making more money that one’s peers often does. This evolutionary pettiness is particularly pronounced in publishing and the arts in general, I think, for all sorts of reasons. In an opaque system in which the the way status is conferred and withdrawn is obscure – money is the only solid determinate of one’s worth. But then, when no one knows for sure how much anyone else gets paid . . . people start to lose it a bit, I think and agree to all sorts of crazy things that benefit no one, in the long run. Except . . . oh yes, the bottom line of the companies themselves.
For example: a few people have emailed me about being offered a promotion that comes with no money attached, but with a higher-status job title. Most people accept this even though it quite literally means more responsibility for less pay. But the improved job title is a solid indicator of status and is therefore extremely valuable, especially to more junior workers, who are the most likely of all to agree to terms like this. It is also a potential source of leverage: you can use the higher status title to apply for that same role (or one a rung above) elsewhere, a job that might (might!) pay more – though, of course, it might not.
Anyway, I think of this as a nice little scam the victim feels thoroughly grateful for, a bit like thanking the guy who mugs you for relieving you of your heavy backpack.
corporate emotional architecture
The upshot of all this is that working in-house at a big corporate publisher is not unlike being a minor player at the court of a medieval king. Intrigue abounds. Favour is granted and bestowed in arcane and sometimes quite random ways. Ways of talking about matters of import change quickly and one’s ability to keep up often (though not always) correlates with one’s success. It’s enough to drive anyone to distraction. It’s enough to drive many people to my inbox, feeling stressed, paranoid, fearful and exhausted. As publishing continues morph into one giant corporate behemoth, chewing up indies and spewing out content at an alarming rate, it’s very much worth remembering that it doesn’t have to be like this.
So to this week’s interview with
the publisher of an independent regional press.
How long have you been working in the publishing business?
I have been making books regularly since the age of 6, but I started publishing as a form of gainful self-employment in January 2011 – so, nearly ten years.
How much money do you make approx. p.a.?
My annual salary is £12,480 – and in a year that has gone to plan, I also take £2,000 in dividends.
How do you feel about the amount of money you earn?
I feel content. I’m the boss, of course, so there’s no one to complain to!
The salary only makes sense in the context of my monthly personal expenditure, which is as follows: £475 rent, £120 utilities, £81 council tax, and something like £350 on food, fun and personal travel. That gives me just under £200 left over to save or, more usually, spend on one-off unexpected bills.
My money philosophy was nicely expressed in a 2005 poem by Kurt Vonnegut, recounting a conversation with Joseph Heller at a billionaire’s house. TL; DR: “I’ve got something he can never have . . . enough.”
Tell us a bit about your job.
As the owner of a small company with six staff, I find myself picking up the jobs that are either too big or, confusingly, too small to come under anyone else’s purview. For example, “too big” would be setting up a comprehensive new system to manage the workflow of each title, and “too small” would be renewing our domain name (literally just four clicks). There seems to be an endless supply of these mini tasks, where it is quicker to just do them myself then delegate them – I wonder if other small business owners experience this phenomenon?
On paper, my average week would go like this:
· Monday: Clear emails, which includes chewing through the “mini tasks” mentioned above. There are circa 200 meaningful “threads” in my inbox each week, but I hear that’s actually not too bad for this industry.
· Tuesday: Wrap and post the orders placed through our website, and any promo copies (can be 70 items a week, thank god for “drop and go”). I didn’t do this myself when we had an office, but now we’re all working at home, I don’t feel I can ask anyone else to keep approx. 900 books in their house!
· Wednesday: Negotiate a contract with a new author. Across our two imprints, we now publish 40 titles a year, so every single working week I am signing someone new. (One of my favourite parts of the job, I must say.)
· Thursday: Take a book to print. This involves me closely inspecting the final PDFs whilst negotiating materials and pricing with a printer. Again, 40 titles a year means I must do this every working week.
· Friday: Marketing day. May include writing our email newsletter, setting up a digital ad campaign, attending a book fair/launch event, or doing an interview like this one (but usually with more plugs for books!)
· Saturday: Business admin, including payroll, paying invoices, tax returns, that sort of thing. Sometimes I might do some editing or design work instead; I try to keep a “hand in” the real meat and potatoes of publishing.
If you’re feeling sorry for me, working six days a week for £12k a year, please note that I do have a week off every month – and each of these days only involves about four hours of actual work. I earn something like £13 an hour in real terms.
How does being a regional publisher affect your perception of the industry?
Like living in the Sahara affects your perception of snow. You’ve heard of it, and you understand the theory – you might even see it occasionally if you take a holiday – but it’s not part of your day-to-day existence. It’s something extraordinary and foreign.
I know that metaphor sounds a bit over the top, but from 2011 to 2017, I was the only person living in my county who earned a salary from trade publishing. That’s an area of over 3,000 square miles. I tried very hard during that time to find another one, but I never did; the drought ended in 2017 when I hired my first on-payroll employee.
When I go to the London Book Fair, my hours are mostly spent looking around in shock and awe. “Who are all these people?” I ask, every time, and I never feel like I remotely belong there. But that’s just me; I’ve seen some regional publishers, like Ra from Comma and Nathan from Dead Ink, move through the LBF like sharks through warm, fish-filled water. (Purposeful, I mean. It’s a compliment!)
How important are independent regional publishers? What do you bring to the market, and to readers, that the London-based companies do not?
Of the 40 titles we publish a year, there will be maybe one (at most) that had a genuine shot with a London-based publisher. The others either have either been turned down by dozens of agents, or picked up by an agent but turned down by every appropriate larger publisher – for those books, we are like a backstop preventing them from slipping into oblivion. The 40 also includes books that are too “niche” to ever be published by a larger publisher, and others that are just too weird.
These titles become viable at my company due to differences in scale: if we publish our 40 titles and they only sell 500 copies each, we still make a profit for the year (and I still collect my £2,000 dividends). The expectations are different. Overall, each year, I reckon circa 15,000 individual readers are getting a unique literary experience they would otherwise have missed out on, were it not for our efforts. How important that is depends largely on your view on the importance of a unique literary experience…
What do you think of the current trend for big corporate publishers opening regional offices?
I think this is a very good thing for the industry; I am a fan of decentralisation in general. When I give a publishing lecture and see all those bright young faces, eager to get involved in the world of books – but without the crucial elements for success in London, such as existing financial resources and/or family in the home counties – this trend helps me to look them in the eye and say yes, there might be a chance you can work in publishing.
However, there are regional offices and regional offices; Manchester is pretty much as far away from my doorstep as London, by train, so it makes zero difference to my personal experience of the industry when a piece of some conglomerate lands in Media City. Good luck though, folks.
Do you have a pension?
I have an investment LISA for my long-term savings, which I find much more satisfying than a pension, for some perverse reason. My company has a pension scheme for our full-timers (who earn more than me, you’ll be relieved to hear), and I am currently weighing up the benefits of joining that.
Do you own a property?
I do not. I rent a part-furnished flat, so besides what was there when I moved in, I own a bright yellow settee and four bookshelves – that’s pretty much it.
Have you made financial sacrifices due to working in publishing?
It’s difficult to know. I tried my hardest to get a graduate job, initially for six solid months after graduating in 2010, and for the odd month every few years since then – moments of weakness when I dreamed of other things, and a bigger, busier life. But there has been zero interest in me as an employee, at any time, since I graduated. I might never have got a job. Maybe I’m unemployable? My degree was in English Literature, so there’s that . . .
How do you feel about your financial future?
I actually feel quite positive about it! My data suggests each backlist title is worth at least £50 a year in passive income; in January we will publish our 174th title. You don’t need to have an MBA to see that this is a business that gets easier the longer you stick around. Until people genuinely stop reading and writing books, I feel like I have a job for life.
Anything else you’d like to say?
It took me five years of full-time self-employed publishing before I was able to earn my current salary. This is a very unusual road to take in life and work, and not for the faint-hearted, but I would definitely recommend it overall. If you only take one thing from this interview, I’d hope it’s an awareness that there are alternative routes to success in publishing, and in life generally – more than that, alternative definitions of success. Only you can decide whether I match up with yours.
I love this interview, and the philosophy it espouses. It’s nice to have some good cheer. Huge thanks to my interviewee and best of luck with your business.
Links
This week, I spoke to James Spackman, who runs the Spare Zoom Project, which helps link people looking to start in publishing (or those who have just started out) with experienced workers. Though I often feel it is my life’s work to discourage people, especially young, intelligent women, from going into publishing at all, the problem with young intelligent people of all genders and none is that it is quite hard to discourage them from pursuing their dreams. So, if you are a job-seeker, check it out, and if you are an experienced literary worker with some time to spare, maybe consider getting involved.
As you might know, I’m trying to limit my time on Twitter. Last week, I took a complete break and unfortunately, my sanity and mental health are much improved. So I’m going to continue to be as abstemious as possible, without going full cold turkey. One thing I don’t enjoy about Twitter is the way it skews my perspective: one can start to think that the things people care about on Twitter are actually the most important things in the world. And that’s really not true. This long piece which explores cultural appropriation makes this point well: the band Arcade Fire were briefly accused of appropriating the music of Haiti which led to much discussion amid the Twitter classes, meanwhile everyone ignores the action of the American government and large multinationals in pushing down the price of labour in that country. I’m guessing that the average Haitian cares a lot more about one of those things and it’s not the one that captures the attention of the average Twitter user, is it?
Obviously, it’s much harder work and far less fun to get one’s head around labour laws and corporate malfeasance than it is to scold a musician or artist for making an error of appropriation, and I cannot boast that I spent last week doing anything to improve the lot of anyone, other than myself. But my brain felt a lot calmer. I felt more in control of my thoughts. And control, or the illusion of some degree thereof, is helpful, as our interviewee this week shows.
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