16. Editor who left

the London question, again

Hello all

Hope you are all okay! Big thanks to everyone who completed the survey, it’s been really interesting to read all your comments. A few things in relation to your feedback:

Re going paid: I really want to keep the interviews free, and I intend to. If you can afford to, a contribution is most appreciated, I have earned about £10 from this since Christmas. But don’t worry, my plans involve adding extra content to make money, not taking anything away.

Re thoughts of more senior people: I am on it! Hopefully soon.

Re how to get out: A lot of you mentioned you’d like to hear from people who left the business about how they managed the transition. I’m thinking of running an event around this at some point. Let me know if you’d be interested in attending and I’ll see if I can get some interesting people to speak. If you yourself would like to speak about this (a happy leaver, an employer who wants publishing-minded people) please get in touch.

And finally, I LOVED this comment from one reader/survey-doer: “I personally am not inanely nice, and publishing’s insistence on (female) editorial servility above all is sickening.”

A billion times yes. Publishing is subsidised by female servility. I had a chat with a lawyer friend recently and she was amused about my comments about how in publishing, we constantly undersell our skills because we don’t feel like we deserve to be here. She said it’s the opposite in law – everyone thinks they are God’s gift for doing what she described as fairly straightforward work (certainly by no means any easier than transforming a novel). Remember, professions maintain high pay by creating scarcity which can involve introducing high barriers to entry (exams to get into PRH, anyone? Or a system whereby an editor achieves a “license” before being allowed to go to town on a novel? Might be fairer than the current work experience merry-go-round or paying £5K for a Publishing MA) or by workplace organising . . . it’s not going to happen by itself!

I hope you enjoy this week’s interview, it’s from another person who left the industry, although a lot of the stuff she had to put up with is pretty shocking. I don’t think people would be as openly hostile towards groups less represented in the business now, but that doesn’t mean these problems have gone away. And in a way, I think the management did our interviewee a favour being so transparent about their prejudices: it meant she knew she had to get out while she could.

Interview

How long did you work in publishing and how much did you get paid? 

I started working in the publishing industry in 2013, and left in 2019. I started on £19,000 and by the time I left, I was earning £26,000.

Tell us a bit about what your job involved.

I began as an Editorial Assistant and progressed to the position of Editor. The first company I worked for primarily did illustrated reference books, so my role was a very creative one. My average day would involve liaising with designers, working with InDesign, editing and sometimes writing text in-house.

The second company I worked for published commercial fiction and non-fiction, so my editorial role there was more of a “traditional” one, I suppose – in that it entailed dealing with submissions, commissioning authors, sorting out book launches etc.

How do you feel about the amount of money you earn?

If I hadn’t been living in London, I would have been happy with the amount of money I earned. But as I was living in London, it seemed exceedingly low – especially in comparison to what my friends working in other industries based in London were earning. 

Do you own property? 

I don’t. But now that I’ve left London, I’ve actually been able to start saving properly, so I’m hoping to in the next few years!

Do you have a pension? 

I did have a pension whilst working in publishing, but I didn’t put much into it.

Have you made financial sacrifices for working in books? Do you think it’s been worth it? 

I believe I did make financial sacrifices, yes. As for if it was worth it? Yes and no. On the one hand, I enjoyed a lot of what I did, and I loved spending my early-mid twenties living in London. The first couple of years were fun and exciting, and I made some lifelong friends through my career, so I don’t regret that. 

It was somewhere around the fourth year that I really started to feel the financial strain. As I reached the age of 26, I started realising that friends who weren’t living in London were starting to buy homes, go on extravagant holidays, preparing to start a family . . . they seemed to be building lives of comfort, independence and security while I was pretty much stuck in the same place I’d been when I was 22 – trying to save a little here and there, but mostly still living month to month. I’d listen to them talk about getting a mortgage or buying a second car, and just stare at them thinking, “But how?? How are you doing that???”

Over the next couple of years, I really started resenting the fact that I was working in an industry that forced me to live in the most expensive place in the country, without paying me the wage I needed to afford to live there independently. I started looking at colleagues who were a decade older than me and still living in Zone 3 flatshares and joking about scraping along until the next payday, and dreading the idea of that being me. Increasingly, I found myself wistfully imagining the lifestyle I could have had if I’d done something else. In the end, I had to make a choice, and I chose to give up my career and start again somewhere else. 

Looking back, I don’t regret the initial financial sacrifices I made, but I wish I’d stopped making them sooner.

What would you change about the industry, to make it fairer, if you had the power to do so? 

I’d move the industry away from London in heartbeat. I’m not saying it would need to leave the capital completely, but I believe that more regional branches and companies moving outside of London altogether would make it so much more accessible to those who are working class, not from the south of England, and/or who don’t have any connection to London. Leeds, Newcastle, Liverpool, York… there are so many amazing, more affordable cities that could benefit from being part of the publishing industry. 

And in turn, I believe this change would benefit the industry, too, as it would inevitably allow for a more diverse, varied workforce. One thing I noticed about the industry was that the majority of people working in it tend to think and feel the same about most things, they have very similar interests and opinions, and that makes it difficult to offer an alternative viewpoint or new idea. At the last company I worked for, it wasn’t uncommon for my manager to say to my face that there was “no point in commissioning books that appeal to the working class because those people just don’t read”, or for the MD to say in a meeting that they “just can’t understand what northerners are saying when they talk, they clearly never learned to speak properly”. These sorts of statements were seen as perfectly acceptable, and were met with laughter and agreement from 99% of the room, while I would sit there frozen, not knowing how to react.

This was the same company where the Publisher and Publishing Director brought me into a meeting to tell me they were concerned that I wasn’t “fitting in” with the rest of the workforce, that I wasn’t “loud enough”, that I didn’t “bring the right ideas” and I “keep leaving on time instead of working late”. They finished by saying I should try being more like *insert names of other editors working in the imprint*. Essentially… I wasn’t like everybody else and that was a problem.

I’d already been seriously contemplating leaving London for financial reasons by that point, but that was the day I went home, thought things over, called my parents for a long talk and decided to hand my resignation in as soon as I was able. 

It’s no wonder diversity in publishing is a problem, if I, a still very privileged white woman, was made to feel so ostracised. So yes, if I could have one wish for the publishing industry, it would be different locations and different types of people.

Do you think money is wisely spent and invested in the business? 

It’s hard to say, since I always found it difficult to work out exactly how money was being spent in the business. Whenever you tried to ask about things like salaries, pay rises, department budgets etc. you were almost always met with vague or contradictory replies. It always seemed impossible to get a straight answer about anything related to finances!

One thing I will say is that if publishing companies remain unwilling to move away from London, they do need to start paying their more junior staff a higher wage – or at the very least be more transparent about what the wages actually are. Because my story isn’t unique; I wasn’t the first in my group of friends in the industry to quit because of financial reasons – far from it. I watched multiple colleagues around my age hand in their resignation, giving their managers a variety of vague, diplomatic reasons (desire for a career change, to be closer to family, for a different lifestyle… the list goes on). Only to then quietly tell the other junior colleagues it was actually because they were sick of working an incredibly stressful job for such a poor wage, of doing so much unpaid overtime, of having every request for a pay rise turned down. I’ve lost count of the number of times I heard people say, “I like my job but I just can’t afford to do it anymore.”

Not investing in your workforce means losing them – and all the creativity and talent they had to offer – and I think as long as long as the cost of London living is high and publishing wages are low, this is a trend that will only increase. Especially since this past year forcing offices to close and people to work from home has proved that you can, in fact, make books from anywhere.

How did you strategise your departure from publishing? 

My departure strategy was relatively straightforward. Once I’d decided I wanted to leave the industry, I kept working up until about a month until the tenancy on my flatshare was due to end. That’s when I handed in my resignation and worked my final four weeks, then moved out of London back to my hometown. The timespan, from the day I decided to leave the industry up until the day I actually left, was roughly four months.

I realise I was in a fortunate position when I decided to leave; I had no mortgage, I was single, I had no commitments that stopped me from cutting ties with London and leaving it behind. I’m also lucky enough to have a wonderful mum who was happy to let me come home and move into her flat while I figured out what my next move was going to be!

Did you study something alongside your job or did you retrain after you left? 

I began retraining through night classes during my final few months in London, and am continuing it now.

Any other comments? 

I just want to say thank you, really! For giving myself and others a chance to voice our thoughts and opinions to a wider audience than after-work drinks at the pub.