How can the rest of us help with the Editorial Burnout Problem?
Some thoughts on what writers and agents can do to shore up our in-house colleagues' sanity.
If you follow Publishing Twitter, you might have seen a bunch of people talking about editorial burnout recently. Two weeks ago, four junior editors publicly resigned on the same day, explaining that they were leaving the industry due to their unsustainable workloads, exhaustion, and untenable income. Various industry people have been discussing these developments ever since.
What follows are some thoughts on What The Rest of Us Can Do. Of course, those of us in the industry who don’t work for publishing companies don’t have that much direct impact on said companies’ work culture or hiring infrastructure, but we do have some. And we owe it to our colleagues to do what we can.
We also owe this to ourselves. We do not want to lose editors or for them to lose themselves. We love editors. Editors are the people who buy what we sell.
Are “all” the junior editors really quitting?
No. Four resignations doesn’t exactly constitute an “exodus,” as I have seen others claim. (You might be surprised how many people actually work in book publishing.)
However: I do think there’s something of a mass human-capital crackup happening right now of which these resignations are just one externally visible manifestation.
In my anecdotal observation, the following things are also happening, largely invisible to social media:
plenty of junior publicists and marketing staff are also quitting.
across the board, email response times have slowed down dramatically in the past two years (I am no exception to this).
email volume, on the other hand, has increased dramatically—especially messages of anxiety (“just checking in”) and anger (“you must not be taking this project seriously!!”)
editors are ghosting vs. passing on submissions much more often than before.
manuscript reads are taking people many months longer than usual (again: I am no exception to this, just calling the trends like I see them—lolsob).
many, many, many colleagues are noticing that on a day-to-day basis, they can’t concentrate on sustained deep-thinking tasks such as editorial reads for nearly as long as they once could.
just about all of us are feeling really, really, really behind; really, really, really guilty; and really, really, really stressed out—perhaps insanely so, considering that this is fucking book publishing!! Not an emergency room. But we are.
Publishing has never been the most well-organized or predictable of cultural institutions. I like to think of it as an old brownstone in New York—the majestic kind that used to be inhabited by a Carnegie or something, but, like, 70 years ago. Much of the grandeur remains now, but in the intervening years, “kooky,” “shambolic,” and “a little old-fashioned” have joined “grand” in the cloud of aesthetic keywords.
One would think this an ideal time to invest in some necessary renovations here in ye olde brownstone. The past two years have been profitable for publishing; there was a nearly 9% increase in print book sales in 2021 vs. 2020.
However: no one seems to be investing these big gains on unglamorous but necessary gut renos. And now, we’re beginning to hear a series of worrisome pops and groans emanating from our (metaphorical) foundation.
Why are editors struggling in particular?
Part of the problem is, as you are likely to know already, that most of them make peanuts money. Whether we’re talking in-house or out, salaries for publishing’s junior employees are quite small, especially relative to the cost of living in a major city.
For those without student loans and/or parental help, an entry-level publishing salary is simply unlivable without side gigs. Worse, payscales in this industry take several years and promotions to become livable.
Fun fact: I know an early-mid career agent who sold bootleg DVDs on eBay to supplement his income (in 2006, so there was a market). I had sympathy drinks with him after eBay caught on and booted him off.
Exactly how low are we talking?
All I’ve got for you is anecdata. Fellow members of my elder millennial cohort and I have whispered about these things many times through the years.
My own starting salary as an assistant in 2008 was $29,000. This was at a literary agency, but it was about the same as what assistant friends with similar experience were making in major houses.
For about 5 years after that, my peers and I generally found ourselves formation salary-wise, rising to lower midlevel positions that paid something in the range of the $40s. After that, various BIG promotions, lateral moves, industry exits, and commission-based compensation structures divided our peloton significantly.
The modal average for my cohort in-house these days—those in their mid to late thirties who have battled their way into upper middle management—seems to be a salary comparable to that of a first-year associate at a mediocre law firm, like $120-160k. This is of course a livable number, but it’s not a bonanza, especially in New York.
As for today’s junior employees: my sense of the pay scale is that it’s comparable to what it was back in the day, albeit with a slightly higher starting point—the high 30s to 40 instead of the high 20s.
The key difference, though, is the context in which these assistants are working. Fourteen years ago, low assistant pay made a grim kind of sense, at least to my 23-year-old brain. We were in the midst of a recession. One of the two big bookstore chains, Borders, was faltering. The general assumption in industry media was that these were the twilight years of both brick and mortar bookstores and—more ludicrously—print books. (Ha ha ha ha—fellow olds, remember the whole “enhanced ebooks are all anyone’s going to be reading within a decade” thing?)
Today? Not so much. Supply chain disasters and chaotic retail environments aside, the industry is doing well. Print books are far from dead. Readers are gobbling them up, and CEOs are cheering record sales in town halls. No wonder the youngs are pissed off.
THAT SAID: in the specific matter of editor attrition and burnout, low pay doesn’t seem to be the core issue.
At least it’s not the issue with the editors I’ve talked to personally or listened to online (like, by reading their tweets and essays). And at least not per se.
Book publishing salaries are famously terrible. All of us who work in book publishing chose this field knowing that we would make very little money at first, possibly forever.
Yes, this norm is all kinds of problematic. Yes, it tends to attract a disproportionate number of clueless young bourgeois 22-year-olds to the industry, many of whom hold fanciful, incorrect notions about how their lives will be affected in the long term by living on a low income.
Nevertheless: low pay comes as a surprise to precisely nobody who takes a job in book publishing. And when one actually listens, one will find that that’s not the #1 or even one of the top 3 things driving young editors from the industry.
I first realized this in the summer of 2020, when a bunch of fellow well-meaning industry white people and I were talking about ways we could help shift more power, time, and resources to BIPOC colleagues. We were discussing the matter of how to “fix” industry finances—fair pay, equitable advances—when a colleague jumped in and reminded our codependent asses that it might be good to listen to what BIPOC colleagues are telling us they needed vs. trying to guess.
Said colleague then linked us to an essay—although I’ve been frantically googling for it today, I’m embarrassed to say I can’t find it—in which a Black colleague wrote that the main problem for her wasn’t her paycheck, it was her bosses’ racism. Her bosses didn’t believe her when she said there’d be an audience for certain BIPOC authors or subjects. Which, yeah. Big problem.
Of course, the current conversation around editorial burnout is different than the one that went down in 2020. It overlaps in a few significant ways, though, including fact that those of us on the outside remain myopically fixated on the financial aspect of the issue. (“When Will Publishing Stop Starving Its Young?” read one NYT headline.) But when we actually listen to the people at the center of this, we hear something different.
The much bigger problem, it turns out, is communication overload.
What’s communication overload?
Emails. It’s fucking emails. It’s also Slack. Trello. AirTable. Texts. Gchat. Teams. Zoom.
It’s “technology illiterate” senior executives relying on junior employees to interface with all these platforms on their behalf, as former Tor editor Molly McGhee put it in her public resignation letter.
It’s executives not factoring in how much time all these digital chores actually take—and worse, how utterly distracting it is for assistants to have to interrupt deep work to do them.
The problem also involves the entitlement enabled by digital culture. Prior to the invention of email, even the most egotistical agent, author, or boss couldn’t expect instantaneous turnaround on that editorial memo or emailed request for validation or reassurance. Now, however, such things are possible within the theoretical parameters of human spacetime, so many of us do expect instantaneous responses. We regard them as an indication of deference and preferential treatment.
As one anonymous big 5 editor put it to me in the DMs:
I suspect some, even among our colleagues, don’t understand that the work day for most editors doesn’t stop until well into the night between reading submissions and editing. At the same time, speed is seen as an advantage in winning over an author in the submissions process. So what gets particularly painful—for me, anyway—when the boundaries between work and home are so porous during pandemic living, is that I can be rewarded in some ways for never stopping my work. Or penalized when I do take a break. The constructive things I’d propose are small: agents and writers should be mindful that the fastest responses aren’t necessarily the ones that are going to yield the best home artistically or financially. And on the agent side, there ought to be some mindfulness that dropping a novel on a Friday afternoon can mean bulldozing an editor's ability to take a break on the weekend. (The pre-weekend giant lengthy submission thing has turned me into the Joker in the last year.)
It is psychological torture to take a career editing books—the ultimate exercise in deep thinking—and try to wind it around the performative, time-wasting, collective embarrassment of today’s corporate communications culture.
I know this in my head because I have heard many, many editors say it. I know it in my bones because I experience it, too. The tug of war between doing deep work and communicating around it is the cardinal strain on my mental health as a literary agent with lots of awesome clients and three young kids.
Every second of my work time is precious. Every second. And every second I am communicating around editorial work is a second I am not able to do that editorial work. But if I don’t communicate around editorial work, this poses enough of a violation of contemporary work-world norms that it causes great anxiety for everyone involved. Including me!
I am a people pleaser. No matter how self-aware or evolved I become, knowing I have made other people anxious or angry will always activate at least a small fight-or-flight response in my brain.
Fight or flight responses are—to say the least—distracting. And for me, this is all without the added knowledge that certain anxious and/or angry people in my inbox could fire me and take my health insurance away if I don’t make soothing them an urgent priority. I work for myself. Editors don’t.
In short, the problem is a vicious cycle: anxiety, email, distraction, cognitive bandwidth contraction, even worse anxiety, even more emails. Getting caught in this feels awful if you’re an intelligent and sensitive person who means well, which is, oh, ALL OF US IN PUBLISHING.
Which brings me to the specific matter of what writers and agents can do to help burnt-out editors.
Good news: by helping them, we will also help ourselves. Here’s what we all need to do.