8. Publishing and the working class

thank you

A few issues back, I mentioned that I was doing a panel event at Future Book on November 16th. I was nervous about it, as I was not quite sure what I could add to the conversation. But the responses I’ve had from many of you have really helped me focus my thinking. In advance of this event, and with the ideas you have shared with me in mind – I’ve written the below.

a crisis

Since going freelance, I’ve had to hustle quite hard to make money. When I started, I had no idea how to talk about the kind of work I know how to do, even though I knew I was really good at it. But then Covid happened. And I started to have more open conversations with people in my community, many of whom, like me are self-employed – people in shops, hairdressers, gyms, etc. We started to discuss what it was like to always have to prove yourself to survive and how a crisis, while frightening, can help you realise what you’re made of. This experience, and the clients I’ve worked with throughout this year, have led to a very helpful shift in the way I think about the services I can offer. I now understand that I possess a specialised set of quite technical skills. And I understand that I owe it to my own self-respect, as well as the respect I have for the work of editors in general – to charge a decent price for these skills. And I think if everyone in publishing started to think of themselves in this way – as accomplished skills-based workers, we might begin to create a healthier, more inclusive and more vibrant work culture.

What I’m saying is this: publishing needs to learn from the working class.

Working class people understand that the only thing they have of value is their labour. In order to survive and thrive (by which I mean, buy a house, have a family if they so wish, go on holiday, live without terror of the next bill), they need to do everything they can to maximise the value of that labour, because they do not have savings, capital or investments to fall back on. That's why working class people dominate trades like plumbing, hairdressing, carpentry, personal training, etc. These trades have traditionally offered a decent day's wage for a day's work. These trades do not have high barriers to entry (you don't need a financially ruinous degree or internship) and also offer high wage transparency. You get paid for overtime (sometimes extra) and these trades also travel well – you can work anywhere in the country, or indeed the world, with these skills, so if a recession hits, you have options.

how do you solve a problem like Maria

Consider a working class person who aspires to buy a house some day and to support a family on the money they earn. By some miracle, this person gets a job at a Big Five publisher without an unpaid internship and with a only an average amount of debt. They start off on £24,000 per annum, which is, I think, the highest starting salary across the business. This person does not know what they might be earning in five years’ time but they assume – from looking at the lifestyles of their co-workers, many of whom go on holiday several times a year, send their kids to private school, live in expensive neighbourhoods – that eventually, the hard work pays off.

This person, let’s call her (because it’s almost always a her) Maria; one day, perhaps two years into her career, Maria decides to calculate how much she is paid, per hour. Maybe it’s because she’s seen her school friends, all from working class backgrounds like hers, start to move up the income brackets and she wants to figure out if she needs a side hustle to keep up. They’re going on a weekend away, and she is embarrassed to find she can’t afford to go with them. Maria did well in school, and does not want her friends to know she is already struggling to keep up with them financially.

£24,000 is around £11 per hour, before tax. Maria feels a thump of shame and panic when she realises that her friend earns more than that as a cleaner. Maria then forces herself to take into account the number of hours she spends reading manuscripts for work, per week. To avoid humiliating herself further, she rounds down, to four hours per week, far less than the real total (this additional work prevents her from taking on any freelance gigs or side hustles to boost her income, but she has been led to believe that such reading is the only way to progress in the business). Maria goes online and sees that she could get a job in Tesco that would pay more per hour than what she makes, when she takes her unpaid overtime into account (Maria tells herself to hush, she is lucky to get to read unpublished manuscripts, one of these days, she’s going to discover a bestseller).

Maria reasons that everyone has to hustle in the early days. One day, she’ll be a senior publisher, running her own list. She tries to find out what such people are paid – and is met with a brick wall. By using the data available on Bookcareers.com, she finds out that the average salary in the publishing industry is around £30,000 p.a. Some of her friends, two years out of university, already make close to this figure, some make more.

This is a Damascene moment for Maria. Though ambitious, deep down she doubts she will ever make it beyond the average wage in her chosen industry. Her other colleagues have a way of moving through the intimidating world of publishing that she does not – and she has seen enough to know how important that is. She does not enjoy social media and this is a problem for her; there seems to be an unspoken rule that she must spend her spare time (when she’s not reading manuscripts) tweeting about books and building a following in the online literary world. She finds participating in literary Twitter in this way embarrassing and exhausting, and she doesn’t want to do it. She has other interests beyond books, and family commitments too.

She talks it over with her friends and they tell her to quit. They know Maria is clever, they can’t believe she works the hours she does for the money she makes. So she leaves.

Maria is young enough to retrain as a nurse/teacher/lawyer/doctor/advertising executive/plumber/hairdresser/nutritionist/. In ten years’ time, she can leave London and find a job easily in a cheaper city, or back home. Or she can stay in London, because she loves it, and she can afford to. She has choices and freedom because she left publishing. She is not reliant on the income of a man, because she left publishing. She smiles at this thought when she witnesses, from afar, the feminist publishing craze of the late 2010s. In 2020, she sees on Twitter that in publishing, senior people are talking about how the working from home revolution means that the problem of high rents on a low salary are solved – the poor ones always whining about their low wages can just leave the city! She feels vindicated, but a little sad. She still loves books, and would have loved to have remained in the industry, if it had been possible for someone like her. But overall, she has no regrets.

Meanwhile, for everyone else, nothing changes. There is little to no tradition of workplace organising in publishing because there is little to no working class tradition in publishing. Any working class person who does make it is held up triumphantly as an example of how the industry is changing, progress is happening. If that person is Black, then they are also required to do unpaid diversity labour. Some of those people refuse to be held up in this way, knowing that they are the exception, not the rule and they do not wish to encourage other people without a fallback into such a risky industry. This is detrimental to the career of those people, further entrenching working class bias.

The industry holds another panel on diversity. The industry publishes another book on bad-ass women. The industry profits from another book dissecting civil unrest. The industry refuses to tell its workers what the average wage is, or what the wealthiest people in it earn.

How can this change?

People in publishing need to organise around their skills.

We need to be open, up front and transparent not only about how much we are paid – about how much we contribute to the products that we help to make.

The cult of the auteur – the idea that only the author makes the book – needs to go. And instead of making do with a pat on the back in the acknowledgements, the people who help make these products must demand a proper price for their labour.

Since leaving mainstream publishing, I have learned to put a high price on my labour – or a price that is high to me (which is hilariously low, I’m sure, to many people in the industry). I am a highly respected, experienced editor. I can work with authors of everything from commercial series fiction for children to literary authors. I will not hire out this labour for an insulting price; frankly, I would rather work at the supermarket. I have worked at a supermarket, and it’s much, much easier – not to mention more useful to society – than ironing out the clunky phrasing of a celebrity memoirist. Luckily, I don’t need to as the only people who offer me an insultingly low price are publishers. Outside the industry, on the open market some publishers love to talk about, people are happy to pay me what I consider a fair price for my skills and expertise.

In fact, it can be easier to get work if you charge a decent price, because writers willing to invest in their skills by hiring an editor know how hard it is to write well. If you are offering your services at a low price, potential clients suspect you will not be any good. This is basic economics. I pay my hairdresser well because it’s better than getting a botched job that I then have to get someone else to sort out. I am as good at editing as my hairdresser is at hairdressing – and he is really good at hairdressing (you can tell because I haven’t been in ages, and I look terrible).

I call on everyone in publishing to know the value of your labour. Figure out what you are being paid per hour, including over-time. Be open about that rate, discuss it with colleagues. Bring it up at appraisals, put it on your email signature. Think of yourself as a plumber, a carpenter, a hairdresser, a personal trainer. These workers would never work for nothing and they will not be low-balled, as we are constantly. When you ask one of these people what they charge for their time, they tell you, upfront and unapologetically. Learn from their dignity and self-respect.

As well as joining the NUJ or Unite (I have spoken to the NUJ a lot about these issues and they are understanding and supportive. I have just joined myself, as a freelance editor), I suggest that we organise around our skills – editors, publicists, marketeers, proof-readers, illustrators.  We should decide what we will and will not accept. We need to share our knowledge, pool resources, support each other. If anyone wants to know what I charge, just email me.

Maybe such organising will drive up the price of the products we make. Maybe we’ll publish fewer books. But as we face into a world that must reckon with the environmental cost of over-production and over-consumption (yes books are consumer goods, much as the industry tries to pretend they are not, with a carbon footprint I can barely bring myself to think about – my god, the pulping), I wonder if this is such a bad thing.

The alternative is the status quo, in which your progress in the industry is dependent on how much the people in power like you. Working class people cannot risk their livelihoods on the whims of a tiny coterie of wealthy people (still mostly white, posh men). If we want to change our industry, we have to risk irritating people in power. I am taking a risk here – there are people I haven’t heard from since I started writing about all of this. But I do think, foolishly perhaps, that not all those people in power actually want things to stay as they are. I sometimes believe them when they say that they want a more representative industry. But if they give it away (which they won’t, because then they would be in breach of their juicy employment contracts), but even if they did – then it wouldn’t be ours. We, the average workers of publishing, have to earn a better, fairer, more representative business through organising and negotiating. We can do it calmly and with dignity, confident that the skills we provide are essential to operation of the publishing industry, confident that if we were to withdraw those skills, the whole thing would fall apart.

No powerful institutions ever change of their own accord. That is one thing every working class person knows.

Many thanks to everyone who read early drafts of this piece and helped me to organise my thoughts on this.

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