Bloomberg Businessweek’s January 25th cover shows a book engulfed in flames. The book’s title? “Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business.” A towering pile of books dominates the front page of Sunday’s NYT Business Section. The pile starts well below the fold (print edition), breaks through the section header at the top of the page, and leans precariously. Books are starting to tumble off. “The Bookstore’s Last Stand,” reads the headline.

These stories capture pretty well the state of book publishing: this appears to be no ordinary, cyclical crisis that future authors and publishers will shrug off. To understand how the book industry got into this predicament, however, a broader perspective may be needed. The cover story of February’s Harper’s Magazine provides that, discussing a fundamental shift in the federal approach to antitrust law that’s affected bookselling and countless other industries. It’s a story that hasn’t previously been told in a major periodical, to our knowledge.

 I’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s set the stage with the other two stories.

Burning Down the Houses

Brad Stone’s Businessweek story discusses Amazon’s campaign to prevent other booksellers from securing a foothold in the booming e-book market and the company’s furious reaction to Random House’s decision last March to adopt agency pricing for e-books, just as five of the other “Big Six” trade publishers had the previous year. (Before agency pricing, Amazon could sell e-books from Big Six publishers at deep discounts, taking losses at a rate that Barnes & Noble could never afford to match. See How Apple Saved Barnes & Noble, Probably for more.)

Mr. Stone writes that after Random House’s March 2011 agency-pricing announcement,

Amazon could no longer run the best play out of its playbook - slash prices and sustain losses in the short term to gain market share over the long term. … “For the first time, a level playing field was going to get forced on Amazon,” says James Gray [of UK bookseller John Smith & Son and formerly of Ingram Content Group]. Amazon execs “were basically spitting blood and nails.”

Amazon’s response to Random House’s move was stunning and swift:

The next month, an Amazon recruiter sent an e-mail to several editors at big publishing houses, looking for someone to launch a new New York-based publishing imprint. “The imprint will be supported with a large budget, and its success will directly impact the success of Amazon’s overall business,” read the e-mail, which was obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek.

Even with a large budget, directly affecting the success of Amazon’s overall business is a tall order for a new publishing imprint. Amazon pulled in well north of $40 billion in revenue last year (final numbers aren’t yet in), dwarfing the combined revenues of the Big Six publishers.

Luring a substantial contingent of bestselling authors away from the Big Six seems the only plausible route for an imprint to affect Amazon’s overall business. Amazon needed someone with a substantial industry pedigree to pull this off. Amazon quickly - in time for last spring’s Book Expo America — landed just the man for the job: Larry Kirshbaum, formerly of Warner Books.

Just three months after Random House’s announcement, Amazon had all but declared war on the six unruly members of its book supply chain. Jeff Bezos had $6 billion in cash, the patience to absorb losses for years, and a former Big Six chief to lead the fight. The long-running behind-the-scenes battle for control of the publishing industry had finally broken into full public view.

Barnes & Noble’s New Role: The Contender

While Amazon directly threatens traditional publishers with its new imprint, it continues to undermine the ecosystem on which book publishers, and most new authors, depend. Julie Bosman describes this well in her NYT article, focusing on the last remaining brick-and-mortar bookseller with nationwide clout:

Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers’ marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense suddenly seems a reach. …

What publishers count on from bookstores is the browsing effect. Surveys indicate that only a third of the people who step into a bookstore and walk out with a book actually arrived with the specific desire to buy one.

“That display space they have in the store is really one of the most valuable places that exists in this country for communicating to the consumer that a book is a big deal,” said Madeline McIntosh, president of sales, operations and digital for Random House.

Established authors, for the most part, do fine selling through online bookstores. It’s new authors who lose out if browsing in bookstores becomes a thing of the past. Advances for unproven and non-bestselling authors have already plummeted, by all accounts. Literary diversity is at risk.

To understand just how precarious things are, realize that last year’s Borders’ bankruptcy represented an enormous reduction in browsing space, shuttering 650 stores. (B&N has about 700 stores.) One benefit of the loss of Borders should have been a short-term lift to B&N’s 700 stores and the 1,500 or so remaining independent bookstores. B&N’s sales were indeed up in the nine weeks before Christmas, Ms. Bosman reports. How much? Borders’ collapse led to a bounce of just four percent, compared to the prior Christmas. That’s what’s passing for good news in brick-and-mortar bookselling at the moment.

There is a bright spot, however. Barnes & Noble, led by William Lynch, has exceeded all expectations in the past two years with its launch of the Nook. B&N’s 300-member Silicon Valley office, after giving Amazon’s Kindle developers a two-year head start, beat Amazon to the tablet market by fully twelve months, and introduced what’s generally seen as the state-of-the-art e-ink reader, the Nook Simple Touch, eight months ago.

B&N, in other words, has been out-engineering Amazon, and Ms. Bosman’s story is the best account we’ve had of B&N’s efforts. In the process, B&N has seen its e-book market share climb from zero, two Christmases ago, to roughly 27% today.

B&N remains vulnerable, however. The engineering race against Amazon continues, and Amazon has leverage for acquiring content for its Kindle (see Contracts on Fire: Amazon’s Lending Library Mess) that B&N can’t match. And, critically, one tool that should help B&N, our antitrust laws, is instead poised to undo it.

This brings us to an unlikely tale of books, chickens, beer, and a Silicon Valley gentlemen’s agreement.

The Backstory: Amazon, Chicken Processors & Silicon Valley

Harper’s cover art rivals Businessweek’s: an enormous businessman wearing a gray pinstriped suit is preparing to literally eat the competition, a jumbo handful of gray-suited men and women. In the article, “Killing the Competition: How the New Monopolies Are Destroying Open Markets,” (key excerpts at link, full article by subscription) Barry Lynn views the state of book publishing through a different lens.

Mr. Lynn makes the case that Amazon’s dominance isn’t just a story of an industry disrupted by online commerce and digital upheaval, it’s about the abandoning of New Deal era protections of retailers in 1975 (promoted by backers as a means to fight inflation, says Mr. Lynn) and what he portrays as a shift in 1981 in the Justice Department’s interpretation of antitrust law based on “Chicago School” theories of efficiency and consumer welfare. The upshot appears to be that non-consumer markets (business-to-business markets and labor markets) are often insufficiently protected from monopolies.

To a chicken grower, for example, the relevant market isn’t restaurants or household consumers of chicken, it’s the market of chicken processors. Through a variety of machinations, including long-term contracts and the physical placement of processing plants (think baseball, before free agency), chicken growers now routinely have a market of only one processor to sell to.

Chicken growers own their land, buildings, and equipment, and all of the debt and risk that go with them, but these entrepreneurs have no real control over their economic lives. Growers buy their chicks and feed from their poultry processor, for example, and processors often require growers to make new investments in buildings and equipment. The processors, Mr. Lynn seems to suggest, have something much better than mere capital: the economic power to dictate how others use theirs.

It’s not just chicken growers who face constrained markets, Mr. Lynn writes. In free-wheeling Silicon Valley, computer engineers and digital animation workers employed by Apple, Google, Intel, and Pixar, among others, were subject to a secret agreement not to bid on each others’ employees, according to a Justice Department lawsuit filed, and settled, in 2010. (On Friday, former employees of some of the companies filed an antitrust lawsuit in federal court in San Jose based on the Justice Department investigation.)

It’s even hit beer. The 1,750 U.S. microbrewers may appear to operate in a competitive environment, but they nearly all sell through two distributors: ABI and MillerCoors control 90% of the distribution market.

For book publishers, the relevant market isn’t readers (direct sales are few), but booksellers, and Amazon has firm control of bookselling’s online future as it works to undermine bookselling’s remaining brick-and-mortar infrastructure. Amazon controls every growing segment of the industry: online physical books, downloadable audio books, online used books, and e-books. Amazon commands about 75% of the online market for print books, and 60% of the e-book market (a percentage that decreased from Amazon’s reported 90% two years ago, as a result of agency pricing).

Mr. Lynn reports on a conversation with the head of one of the largest publishing houses in the U.S.:

He explained that Amazon was once a “wonderful customer with whom to do business.” As Jeff Bezos’s company became more powerful, however, it changed. “The question is, do you wear your power lightly? … Mr. Bezos has not. He is reckless. He is dangerous.”

The head of a small publishing house in Manhattan, Mr. Lynn reports, was even more blunt:

“Amazon is a bully,” he said, his voice rising, his cheeks flushing. “Anyone who gets that powerful can push people around, and Amazon pushes people around. They do not exercise their power responsibly.”

Neither man allowed me to use his name. Amazon, they made clear, had long since accumulated sufficient influence over their business to ensure that even these most dedicated defenders of the book - and of the First Amendment - dare not speak openly of the company’s predations.

Mr. Lynn then turns to Amazon’s blackout of Macmillan’s buy buttons, two years ago this week:

At the time, Amazon and Macmillan were scrapping over which firm would set the price for Macmillan’s e-books. Amazon wanted to price every Macmillan e-book, and indeed every e-book of every publisher, at $9.99 or less. This scorched-earth tactic, which guaranteed that Amazon lost money on many of the e-books it sold, was designed to cement the online retailer’s dominance in the nascent market. It also had the effect of persuading customers that this deeply discounted price, which publishers considered ruinously low, was the “natural” one for an e-book.

In January 2010, Macmillan at last claimed the right to set the price for each of its own products as it alone saw fit. Amazon resisted this arrangement, known in publishing as the “agency model.” When the two companies deadlocked, Amazon simply turned off the buttons that allowed customers to order Macmillan titles, in both their print and their e-book versions. The reasoning was obvious: the sudden loss of sales, which could amount to a sizable fraction of Macmillan’s total revenue, would soon bring the publisher to heel.

This was not the first time Amazon had used this stratagem. The retailer’s executives had previously cut off small firms such as Ten Speed Press and Melville House Publishing for bucking their will. But the fight with Macmillan was by far the most public of these showdowns.

In the late 1970s, when a single book retailer first captured a 10 percent share of the U.S. market, Congress and the regulatory agencies were swift to react. As the head of the Federal Trade Commission put it: “The First Amendment protects us from the chilling shadow of government interference with the media. But are there comparable dangers if other powerful economic or political institutions assume control…?”

***

Today, … a single private company has captured the ability to dictate terms to the people who publish our books, and hence to the people who write and read our books. It does so by employing the most blatant forms of predatory pricing to destroy its retail competitors. … [It] justifies its exercise of raw power in the same way our economic autocrats always do: it claims that the resulting “efficiencies” will serve the interests of the consumer.

The book industry is in play, and has been for a while. The good news is that people are finally starting to pay attention.

Here is a short URL for linking: http://tinyurl.com/7vo73pb

[RPCV Jason Boog (Guatemala 2000-02) is the editor of the important industry page, GalleyCat, which is part of mediabistro.com site. If you write, and or you are interested in publishing, you need to check out this site. Jason writes today a timely piece on the state of book pubishing.]

“According to the Association of American Publishers (AAP) net sales revenue report for December, adult mass market paperback sales dropped 40.9 percent compared to the same period the year before. Overall trade sales declined almost three percent, dipping from $561.3 million to $545.1 million.

“Overall trade book sales saw a four percent drop and mass market paperback sales declined nearly 36 percent for the year. While eBook sales increased 117 percent last year, they still have not closed the gap with declining print sales.

“Here’s more from the release: “The December report represents data provided by 77 publishers and only sales of the participants are reported.”

In The Wall Street Journal (Friday, December 8, 2011) I read an article about Darcie Chan, a full-time lawyer who drafts environmental legislation during the day and at night, after she has put her toddler son to bed, writes novels. Finishing her first novel, and after dozens of publishers and more than 100 literary agents rejected, she had a decision to make: quit writing or get published someway.

Not giving up, and reading about e-book publishing, she decided to publish the book herself and went ahead and bought some ads on Web sites that target e-book readers, paid for a few reviews, and priced the book at .99 cents. She has (so far) sold more than 400,000 copies.

What gives?

According to the Association of American Publishers digital self-publishing has serious drawbacks. While e-books are the fastest-growing segment of the book market, they still make up less than 10% of overall trade book sales.

Few newspaper or magazine reviews them. No book store will handle them. And all e-book authors have to market themselves, spend their own money to promote their own book.

Nevertheless, a few writers have moved from e-books to publishing houses. John Locke, who has sold more than 1.7 million digital copies, just signed with Simon & Schuster. J.A. Konrath, a mystery writer, has sold 400,000 digital copies of his self-published books, and earns about $500,000 a year from writing. He just signed with Amazon and they will do a hardback of his new novel, Stirred.

Now Darcie Chan, who had worked for the federal government on the natural-resource team for the Senate’s Office of the Legislative Counsel, started writing in 2002. Her first novel is about a wealthy, agoraphobic Vermont widow who makes anonymous gifts to the townspeople who ignore and fear her.

After failing to sell it, she uploaded it to Amazon Kindle, on their self-publishing program.

She fashioned a cover image out of an old photograph her sister took of a mansion in their small home town in Indiana. She used Photoshop to add some gloomy ambiance to it. Besides Amazon, she started selling it on Barnes & Noble’s Nook and through SmashWords, a self-publishing program that distributes to major-e-book retailers including Apple’s iBookstore, Sony and Kobo. Her first royalty check from Amazon was for $39.

To enhance sales, she dropped her price from $2.99 to .99 cents when she realized that  that popular e-books sold for that among. Sales picked up. Her book got mentioned on a site called Ereader News Today, which posts tips for Kindle readers. She spent $1,000 on marketing, buying banner ads on websites and blogs devoted to Kindle readers and a promotional spot on goodreads.com, a book-recommendation site with more than six million members.

She paid $35 for a review from IndiaReader.com. She paid $575 for an expedited review from Kirkus Reviews.

Sales continued to climb. Six film studios have inquired about movie rights. Two foreign publishers bid on the book. So far, she has made about $130,000.

She is working on another novel.

And she is hoping, she says, that a publisher will finally buy the book, edit it and sell it in brick-and-mortar stores.

Lets hope-for her sake–that they hurry while there still are brick-and-mortar stores!

What does this tell us? How can RPCV writers use this information?

Here’s how:

• You need to price it right.
• You need to market it.

Publishing an e-book is like any other business. It takes a lot of work and investment after the writing is done. So turn on your computer and get to work!

This article appeared a few days ago in the LA TIMES. It was written by Alex Pham. If you are a  published writer or want to become a published writer, you should read this article on self publishing and the future (and past) of publishing.

•

Joe Konrath can’t wait for his books to go out of print.

When that happens, the 40-year-old crime novelist plans to reclaim the copyrights from his publisher, Hyperion Books, and self-publish them on Amazon.com, Apple Inc.’s iBooks and other online outlets. That way he’ll be able to collect 70% of the sale price, compared with the 6% to 18% he receives from Hyperion.

As for future novels, Konrath plans to self-publish all of them in digital form without having to leave his house in Schaumburg, Ill.

“I doubt I’ll ever have another traditional print deal,” said the author of “Whiskey Sour,” “Bloody Mary” and other titles. “I can earn more money on my own.”

For more than a century, writers have made the fabled pilgrimage to New York, offering their stories to publishing houses and dreaming of bound editions on bookstore shelves. Publishers had the power of the purse and the press. They doled out advances to writers they deemed worthy and paid the cost of printing, binding and delivering books to bookstores. In the world of print, few authors could afford to self-publish.

The Internet has changed all that, allowing writers to sell their works directly to readers, bypassing agents and publishers who once were the gatekeepers.

It’s difficult to gauge just how many authors are dumping their publishing houses to self-publish online, though for now, the overall share remains small. But hardly a month goes by without a well-known writer taking the leap or declaring an intention to do so.

In addition to Konrath, bestselling author Seth Godin, science fiction writer Greg Bear and action novelist David Morrell recently have used Internet tools to put their works online themselves. Earlier this year, suspense master Stephen King, Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho and Stephen Covey, the author of bestselling self-help books, self-published some of their works exclusively on Amazon’s Kindle bookstore.

Godin, the author of a dozen books on marketing, including “Purple Cow” and “The Dip,” cut ties to Penguin Group Inc. in August. This month, he announced plans to self-publish a series of “idea manifestos” on Amazon.com.

Godin, 50, said he realized that he no longer needed a publisher to distribute his work or to find an audience: He had cultivated a following of millions through his blog and speaking tours.

“If an author has the choice of two distribution models, one that costs nothing and has no gatekeeper and the other has lots of gatekeepers and costs a lot of money, a lot of people will go with the free one,” he said.

Amazon’s Digital Text Platform lets authors sell their works through its Kindle bookstore. Those who set their prices between $2.99 and $9.99 per copy receive 70% of the sale price, minus a few pennies per book to cover the cost of distributing files over a cellular network.

Sony Corp.’s online ReaderStore also lets authors sell their works directly to buyers, giving writers 70% to 85% of the sale price. In October, Barnes & Noble Inc. launched its PubIt! self-publishing platform, promising royalty rates of 40% to 65%.

The upshot is that writers can find virtual shelf space in the world’s largest bookstores without the help of conventional publishers. And the number of forums for online bookselling continues to grow.

This fall, Amazon and Google Inc. unveiled online tools that can turn any website into a bookstore.

Google launched an online bookstore with millions of titles and said it would let independent booksellers sell those works on their own sites. Amazon said it would allow any website to sell Kindle books and would pay a referral fee for every sale.

“Publishers used to be the gatekeepers,” said Mike Shatzkin, a New York publishing consultant and editor of the Shatzkin Files (www.idealog.com/blog), a blog about the book industry. “Going through the gate still has certain benefits, but it’s no longer the only way for authors to get to where they want to go.”

For now, those benefits include editing, cover design, marketing support, accounting and advances on royalties. In exchange, publishers control the copyrights to works and take a larger slice of the sale price.

Authors typically get 10% to 25% of the proceeds of digital sales if they go through a publisher, compared with 40% to 70% if they self-publish.

For Konrath, the math made his choice easy. He said he earned $1.17 in royalties for each digital copy of “Whiskey Sour” sold by Hyperion. That’s roughly 25% of the sale price of $4.69.

When he self-publishes on Amazon, Konrath prices his books at $2.99 and earns $2.04 a copy, or just under 70%.

“If a traditional publisher offered me a quarter of a million dollars for a novel, I’d consider it,” he said. “But anything less than that, I’m sure I can do better on my own.”

Digital book sales make up 9% of the overall market and are growing rapidly. During the first 10 months of this year, they reached $345 million, a 171% increase over the same period in 2009, according to the Assn. of American Publishers.

Print book sales dropped 23%, to just under $4 billion, in the same 10-month span.

Publishers say they are keenly aware that the ground is shifting, but most don’t see the situation as dire.

Talk of the demise of traditional publishers is “cocktail party sensationalism,” said Neil De Young, executive director of Hachette Book Group’s digital division in New York. “Our core mission hasn’t changed because of digital. We continue to be the venture capitalist for authors, helping them to distribute their works as widely as possible. Now we do that digitally as well as physically.”

James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., agrees that publishers can still play a valuable role - for now.

With millions of titles potentially flooding the market, readers will have to rely more on external cues to guide their purchases, whether it’s a favorable review from a celebrity, a tip from a social-media contact or the backing of a major publisher.

“Until someone comes up with an algorithm to sort the good manuscripts from the bad, publishers and their human network of agents and editors maintain an advantage,” McQuivey said. “But sooner or later someone will create a new way for readers to find the books they most want to read, and that someone may or may not be a traditional book publisher.”

It may not even be human.

Amazon, Apple Inc., Netflix Inc., Pandora Media Inc. and other technology companies use software that analyzes consumer behavior to recommend choices in music, movies and other products.

Indeed, the challenge in a world where anyone can publish a book is getting people to pay attention.

In a blog post titled “Moving on,” about his decision to self-publish, Godin wrote that “my mission is to figure out who the audience is, and take them where they want and need to go, in whatever format works.”

The Internet is opening up new ways for writers to connect with readers.

Last year, Bear and another bestselling science fiction author, Neal Stephenson, teamed up to create “The Mongoliad,” a subscription-based historical novel based on the conquests of Genghis Khan. The authors, along with about half a dozen other writers, take turns writing chapters, which are published weekly on http://mongoliad.com/ and on Apple’s iPad and iPhone devices.

Readers pay $5.99 for a six-month subscription or $9.99 for a year to be able to read the chapters as they come out. A handful pays $1,000 to become lifetime patrons of the series.

The project uses software to let readers discuss the novel in forums on its website, contribute artwork for the book and even spin their own tales using a collaborative writing tool.

Although the technology is new, the creative model is a throwback to the days when newspapers published serial novels, or earlier when storytellers traveled from place to place looking for people who would pay a few coins to hear a tale.

“We’re allowing the reading public to sit there and be our editors, to engage in a dialogue with us,” said Bear, 59, of Seattle, whose 30 science fiction books include “Darwin’s Radio” and “Eon.” “Technology is making it possible for us to take advantage of reader feedback to create a story.

“This is the future of the book as I see it. Fewer and fewer people are walking into a bookstore. You have to reach readers in other ways. Because, ultimately, the new gatekeepers will be the readers.”

alex.pham@latimes.com

According to recent articles in Publishers Weekly and The Writer’s Chronicle publishing is a woman’s place. 85% of all publishing employees with fewer than three years experience are now women.

Agent Jason Pinter says, “I hope it doesn’t get worse–if 85% of the industry is female–it’s hard to think that acquisitions aren’t in some way affected by that.” But Lindy Hess, director of the graduate Columbia Publishing Course, compares publishing to teaching: a field traditionally open to women. She also added that women tend to read more then men!

And add to that insult (for men!) the Washington Post wrote that in the years 2008-2009, for the first time in U.S. history, women earned more doctorates than men. According to the Council of Graduate Schools: 28,962 doctoral degrees went to women and 28,469 to men.

But what about ’show me the money’? Well, here men out score women. According to Publishers Weekly’s survey of publishing salaries, women are making $64,600 compared to $105,130 for men. (In the academic world, male faculty members at universities earned an average of $16,606 more than females in the academic year 2009-10.)

Putting the money aside, men still lead (in all categories ) in watching football games on Sunday afternoons.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk & E.B. White

The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear by Ralph Keyes

The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging by the editors of the Post.

Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction–and Get It Published by Alfred Fortunato and Susan Rabiner

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner

The Portable MFA in Creative Writing by The New York Writers Workshop

On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Also check out:

Poets & Writers magazine (www.pw.org)

www.awpwriter.org

Magazine staffs are usually broken down into two divisions: editorial and advertising.

Editorial Assistant: Editorial staff are usually subdivided departmentally, depending on the focus and structure of the magazine. Again, the duties of the entry-level editorial assistant are largely administrative and/or clerical–but in addition to these, the assistant may also review manuscripts, give opinions on story proposals, line edit copy, generate story ideas, post items on the website, and even write for the magazine itself. Production cycles are much shorter in magazine publishing than they are in book publishing, since most magazines publish monthly or even weekly. Thus, the world of magazines can at times seem much more frenzied than the world of books, which moves at a slower and more deliberate pace.

Advertising Assistant: Advertising assistants at magazines  help their bosses sell advertising space–and have done that, work very hard to maintain good relationships with advertisers so they’ll continue to buy space. In addition to basic clerical duties, an assistant will work on presentations; write reports on circulation, demographic distributions, and reader purchasing patterns; coordinate promotional functions and activities (breakfasts, parties, etc); and perform a variety of other duties designed to woo buyers and to keep them happy once they’ve been wooed.

A production assistant will work with copy editors, typographers, binders, and designers to help with the actual construction of a book. As more and more publishers realize that an unusual design or arresting cover art cn help sell books, this area of publishing is getting more fun and inventive. Of course, good copy editors have always been and will always be essential to publishing of any sort.

A publicity assistant sends out galleys (early bound and typeset copies of a book) to select book reviewers at newspapers and magazines, maintains and updates lists of reviewers who should receive free copies of the published book one it’s out, works with his/her boss to arrange radio, print, and television interviews for authors, and may work to organize book release parties and signings at bookstores. Additionally, the assistant needs to know all the social media venues like Facebook and Twitter as this, too, is how books are promoted. Publicity assistants go on to become publicity directors–and because good publicity is so important to book sales, the best publicists sometimes move on to corporate marketing and executive publishing levels.

There are also two other ‘assistant’ roles, one in marketing where the department seeks to build ways of promoting the book on its own, via web campaigns and book events. There is a  role for an assistant in the Subsidiary Rigths Office, which means lots and lots of data entry, recording the details of the many, many deals that come through, and constantly communicationg with agents and other publishers.

The changing, consolidating nature of publishing staff today is that everyone, even assistants in various departments, are taking on more and more responsibility. In the past, where the job of ‘assistant’ use to mean mainly administrative tasks, today the position comes with more and more duties and responsibilities. That said, there are basically three entry level jobs in book publishing. The first one is:

Editorial Assistant

An editorial assistant, in addition to performing the universal assistant-duties mentioned above, might be called upon to review incoming manuscripts and provide reports to his/her boss; to go through the “slush” pile of unsolicited queries from hopeful authors, and bring anything worth a look to the editor’s attention’ and to work with agents and authors to ensure that contracts are handled and processed correctly. Today, many Editorial Assistants will have their own authors and projects, and participate in editorial meeting where books are presented by other editors seeking to buy them for the company. Editorial Assistants also make luncheon reservations for the editor and handle special request. For example, my wife’s first assistant in publishing, when she was a young editor, had the job of getting her a Coke every afternoon (to be fair, she also bought him one!).

Editorial assistants often go on to become assistant or associate editors, and then senior editors. Each position brings with it more direct responsibility for the overall concept behind, and presentation of, a new book. The pinnacle of any editor’s career is to have his or her own ‘imprint’ –a line of books to be determined completely by the editor’s own tastes.

Often, and I am seeing more and more of this lately, as the book industry is shrinking, editors are leaving (i.e., getting fired) book companies, they are  becoming literary agents and free- lance editors.

Remember that former editorial assistant for my wife who got her Cokes? Well, today he has his own imprint and is incredibility successful in book publishing. Now someone else is getting him his afternoon Cokes!