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This article is different from my typical ones, as it’s dedicated to some book publishing industry news that happened in early March 2022. I know many writers and emerging authors are interested in the traditional publishing process and the industry as a whole, so this news that took over “publishing Twitter” may be interesting to you as well.

Many professionals in the industry, including editors and literary agents, are very active on Twitter. If you follow any agents or editors, you may have seen glimpses of what happened in March. But if you’re not interested at all in using Twitter or feel a little out of the loop when it comes to book publishing news, I am here with my debriefing on the situation and some thoughts I have.

I like to stay up to date on the industry and have connections from when I worked in the publishing industry. Prior to starting my independent book editing business, I worked at Penguin Random House, and before that I worked at Macmillan and a top literary agency, so I do have some inside knowledge on where some of this conversation stemmed from.

I'm going to go over what exactly happened, why I think it happened, and what it all means for aspiring authors who are interested in getting their book published at a major publishing house. Now, this is 100% just my interpretation and commentary on the news. I am certainly not going to be able to cover every part of the conversation or all its nuances in this article. I’m just here to offer my personal thoughts.

What Happened?

To get into the meat of the situation, I’ll chronologically go over what happened and why publishing Twitter reacted the way it did.

On March 11, four junior and mid-level editors at the Big Five publishing houses announced their resignations. The Big Five houses are Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster.

I think this shook the industry because they announced their resignations at once, sparking a larger conversation about burnout and workload in the editorial department at publishing houses. All kinds of publishing professionals were sharing their own experiences with a negative work environment, creating a larger dialogue about the flaws in the industry and things that editors would like to see changed.

It is important to note that most of the conversation consisted of Big Five editors retweeting and quote tweeting others with their own commentary. However, some of these issues certainly apply to smaller and independent publishers, as well as literary agencies, who are also highly involved in the industry. Also, while the conversation was centered around editorial departments specifically, many of the issues mentioned apply to other departments like publicity, marketing, and design as well.

Another note is that, in general, there have been more resignations from editors than just those four individuals. During the pandemic, many professionals have been leaving the publishing industry, just as with other industries. Publishing professionals have been noticing this trend of people leaving the industry for a couple years now. So many of the topics of conversation have been a long time coming.

Why Did This Happen?

To delve deeper, let's go over why this happened. You may be wondering why there is a discussion on burnout in editorial departments. After all, reading books all day is considered a dream job for many.

To answer this, I’ll give some context on how publishing houses are structured and what book editors do. The editorial department overall is responsible for acquiring books from literary agents, editing those books, and seeing them through to publication.

The entry-level position here is the editorial assistant, and in that capacity you are typically assigned to higher level editors to help them with editorial tasks for their book projects and with administrative tasks. Those tasks can include handling their mail, calendar, and email responses.

In my experience as an editorial assistant at Penguin Random House, my administrative work took up my entire nine to five shift. To complete my editorial work, I worked nights and weekends without compensation or overtime. While this sounds ridiculous, it’s actually what was expected of assistants. It’s expected that assistants finish whatever work they didn’t get done during the day, which tends to be editorial work, on their own time.

This expectation is where some of the conversation about burnout is coming from, because the work that you signed up to do and are passionate about is actually relegated to your off hours. There is a cycle in assistant editorial work where you're always working, either in the office doing admin or out of the office reading and editing. As you can imagine, these assistants are exhausted. I definitely feel for the editors who were citing burnout as one of the reasons for leaving the industry.

It's also important to know that promotion timelines in the publishing industry are very, very slow. Each position can take anywhere between two to five years to move out of, and the promotion itself will come with a little raise or none at all, just a higher title. The title after “editorial assistant” is “assistant editor,” and then after that is “associate editor.”

All three of those positions are virtually the same. You are still going to be assisting one to two higher level editors. But the difference is, as you move up in those three roles, you are expected to take on more and more independent editorial responsibility.

That means you are expected to start building your own list by acquiring books from literary agents on your own. This process requires that you make the time to network with agents, review submissions, and edit on your own time in addition to helping your bosses and doing all that admin work that I mentioned earlier.

This results in an unmanageable workload, and it can be disheartening for a junior or mid-level editor, who is trying to work their way up the ranks.

Add to this environment the fact that the salaries in the publishing industry are notoriously low, especially for living in the New York metro area. Salaries have gotten better in recent years, with publishing houses trying to up their starting rates, and the pandemic has helped a little bit because now more positions can be remote. But the salaries themselves are still noticeably low. To give you some perspective, my starting salary when I started at Penguin Random House in 2017 was $38,000, and I was living in New York City at the time.

As a result, most junior level employees at publishing houses have some combination of family support, either through housing or financial support, or have gigs on the side to alleviate some financial pressure.

With this overview of the junior and mid-level editorial world, you may be wondering why people stay in these jobs in this industry.

The largest reason is that the highs in publishing feel very high. Personally, I loved my team and everyone I worked with. I loved my bosses and all the books I worked on. One of the four editors who resigned early March actually cited that the first book she acquired debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. Talk about a career high!

Everyone that works in the publishing industry loves books, and it feels amazing when a book you worked on or helped create finds huge success. People who get into this industry are passionate about bringing stories into the world, which is why editors stay despite all of these issues with the industry and despite the workload and low salary.

There's also this sentiment in publishing that because you're doing it as a passion job, you don't think about the money as much. However, this line of thinking is ultimately unsustainable and is a tough way to think about a job that should provide you with a living.

It does seem like more and more people in editorial are reaching this breaking point where the combination of burnout and financial stress is leading them to pursue other career avenues, hence the publishing industry news discussion on Twitter.

What Does This Mean for Authors?

Now that I've given you an overview of the conversation, I want to go over what this means for authors who are trying to get their books traditionally published. These are just my thoughts on how these editorial resignations can impact the industry and authors at large.

First, the most immediate consequence is creating smaller editorial teams that will be more overburdened. There will be fewer editors for literary agents to submit their clients’ manuscripts to. When an editor leaves a publishing house, all their books and authors have to get covered by the other editors until someone new is hired. Basically, their resignation adds to the other editors’ workloads in addition to having this person missing.

This is going to result in the remaining editors becoming even more overwhelmed than they were already. They will likely get backlogged with submissions and take even longer to review them. From my experience, editors already are on a backlog with submissions, as my job was to do the first pass review on submissions from literary agents. There were always several dozen projects in our inbox at any given time.

I can only imagine that there are many submissions that editors are sitting on now, because that is the last thing on their to-do list when they have other, more urgent projects to get done. Submissions are probably going to be lower on the priority spectrum, even though that's the work that they want to be doing.

With this situation on the editorial end, that also might mean that agents are going to become even more wary of submitting their clients’ manuscripts to editors at this time. They are fully tuned into publishing industry news and therefore aware of this editorial crisis, and they don't want to add to that by slamming more manuscripts on editors. It could be the case that they are going to wait a little bit longer to send out their clients’ manuscripts, maybe longer than the client would like.

But until there’s more shuffling around in the industry and more of those vacancies filled, there may be a slowing down of literary agent submissions to publishing houses.

This could be a positive for authors, as they now have more time to work on their manuscripts with their agents.

But it could also have a negative consequence for authors who haven’t secured representation yet, as some agents might be less open to taking on new clients at this time. As they already have an existing client list, agents may instead just focus on those clients. I hope that's not the case, but it is a potential consequence.

On a more holistic side, I do see some positive potential ramifications of these editorial resignations, and that is first potentially getting some new faces in the industry. Publishing has a diversity problem, as we know, and open editorial slots can bring in new talent to balance out the editorial teams. I have already seen several postings for editorial openings at Big Five houses, so I hope that that ends up being the case.

I also hope that some veterans in editorial departments get some well-deserved promotions that are likely long overdue, so they can take on those higher level roles and even be relieved of admin duties to get more editorial work. This would also give agents new editor options to submit their clients’ manuscripts to, which is always a good thing for authors.

These are my thoughts on the publishing industry news and reckoning that is going on right now. I hope this gave you some insight into the industry and was interesting, because I do think it's important for emerging authors to keep tabs on how the industry works and to understand the nuances of the business side of publishing. All this information will help you understand how you and your book fit into the marketplace and put you in a stronger position to traditionally publish.

Thanks so much for reading and happy writing!

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