That's not how this works! That's not how any of this works!
Forget "Younger:" the REAL misinformation about book publishing gets perpetuated by legit real-world media people who ought to know better.
No matter what your career expertise, you’re probably used to people getting it wrong on TV. I’m not just talking about depictions in fanciful scripted programming, your Laws & Order and your Sexes and the City; I’m talking about the actual news. People get everything about pretty much every career wrong on there, and they do it a lot.
Airline pilots, for example, routinely grit their teeth through reports of “emergency landings” that are in fact just routine diversions filmed and posted by anxiety-muppet passengers. OB/GYNs facedesk their way through scaremongering daytime TV hits about hormone replacement therapy. You get the picture.
Teachers, lawyers, epidemiologists, and yes, book publishing types: people are frequently wrong in public about us all. However, the ways media people get book publishing in particular wrong are distinctively annoying, if I do say so myself. The distinction is that the errors tend to be based on reportorial egotism and self-interest versus ignorance or sloppiness.
My primary goal in this week’s newsletter is to gripe about incorrect recent and recent-ish media coverage of my industry. Bad reporting has been causing my authors A LOT of needless agita lately, and as the professional in charge of soothing said agita, I am not amused.
My second goal is to point out the underlying egotism of these errors. My hope is that this knowledge will spare you some anxiety the next time you’re tempted to wonder if another person’s publishing calamity is relevant to you. (It’s probably not.)
Remember: when you see someone in the news describing a nightmarish publishing experience in language that makes it sound completely arbitrary, there is almost certainly some inconvenient truth they’re leaving out. They’re leaving it out because having a career in media is precarious and terrifying, and scared people make scared little baby decisions sometimes.
All of us act like scared babies at some time or another. That’s life. But we need not torture ourselves into thinking other people’s scared baby behavior is about us.
OK? OK.
NOW ONTO MY GRIPES.