On finding and loving the metadata
Or: why you should care about the boring stuff (and the BISG).
When a dysfunctional family implodes, volatility rules the ruins. Survivors learn to make do in a nonsense world: rages that flare out of nowhere; protracted, eerie silences; wild fluctuations in fortune. Adults almost never mean what they say or know what they mean—or maybe some special combination of the two; it’s hard to tell. In any case, they obsess over trivial irritations while ignoring existential threats, and they teach their children to do the same.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Tolstoy began Anna Karenina by hinting at the loneliness of such a life. Healthy families communicate in a lingua franca: shared signals, understandings, meanings, truths. Dysfunctional ones, on the other hand, cower in the fragments of Babel.
To save oneself, one must learn a common language.
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Book publishing is a kind of dysfunctional family. We’re nowhere near the top of the institutional dysfunction list—hat tip, federal government—but nevertheless, volatility rules.
One example of this is something called the bullwhip effect. In any supply chain, small lurches on one end amplify and increase as they travel to the other. Say sales of a particular perfume, L’Avocado, unexpectedly spike. Its manufacturer, Le Babbo, scrambles to make more. In turn, Gourmand Inc., the chemical supplier from which Le Babbo purchases fragrance notes, cranks up their own production, anticipating scaled demand for guacamole-adjacent perfume not just from Le Babbo but from all the other brands they supply. Things keep compounding from there, right on through to the Chinese factories who make green atomizers and ovoid glass bottles.
If the demand for L’Avocado turns out to be fleeting, the bullwhip cracks on everyone. Cash poor and mired in unsold stock, Le Babbo cancels its next order from Gourmand. Gourmand has to figure out a way to liquidate warehouses full of guacamole essence; they freeze hiring and halt R&D for future trends, and so on. Everyone is fucked.
In most supply chains, e.g. luxury fragrance, the parties collaborate closely and well to minimize such volatility, finding ever more efficient ways to share and analyze data. That way, they have a better chance of sorting the anomalies from the trends. Not so much in book publishing, where the bullwhip effect is eight to ten times worse than the manufacturing industry average. Publishers and retailers constantly make incorrect guesses about future demand, a phenomenon to which some have referred as a “gambling problem.” Data collection is haphazard at best and extraordinarily difficult to analyze at scale. Waste and anxiety abound. Our bullwhip, in other words, cracks painfully hard and often—hardest at present on midlist authors, mid-career editors, and anyone who deals in serious nonfiction for a living.
This is just one example of what I mean when I say that publishing is a dysfunctional family. There are countless other ways in which different parties in the supply chain fail to speak each other’s language, or whatever intimacy cliché you prefer. This is a real problem in an industry where, as with intimacy itself, mutual legibility is the entire game.
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Writing a book might be a solo act, but publishing one is all about mutual understanding: author and reader, agent and editor, editor and executive, salesperson and bookstore buyer, soul and soul. Each of us must recognize, cherish, and be able to speak to the value in the other. If any of us fails to do so, our books will probably fail too. This is what social scientists call the Anna Karenina principle: success requires understanding across many fragile factors; if just one of them falters, so does the whole.
Every link in the supply chain is thus of the utmost importance. It is of existential importance—and yet authors (and their agents) tend not to think about most of them. Like so many systemic challenges, most of the supply chain feels beyond us, amorphous, uncontrollable. We don’t even know where to begin. So we fasten instead onto petty irritations: 2* Goodreads reviews, Madeline Cash-related jealousies, panic that our publicist isn’t “doing anything.”
Meanwhile, we ignore tons of much more consequential matters: metadata, print runs, discoverability, and all the other infrastructure that determines whether a book sails or sinks into the sea.
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I’ve been meaning to write this post for years—one in which I beg us all to think more about the “boring stuff” in publishing—but every time I thought about it, I stalled. The supply chain bored me in the way stable, well-adjusted people sometimes do. I said to myself, maybe there’s just nothing interesting here. The whole thing made me sleepy.
So what changed? What changed was that I met Brian O’Leary.
