Digest 03/01/2023

THE MEDIA CLASSIFIED ADS

►The inaugural Hyundai Artlab Editorial Fellowship is now open. Two selected writers will receive $10,000 to produce arts writing that brings new perspectives to a global network of readers and explore their communities with an eye toward forward-thinking solutions. Learn more here.

►Visual, multimedia news publication, Frame, is hiring a managing editor! We are looking for an editor interested in helping produce underreported social/political stories, presented in immersive, multimedia article formats that help readers deeply engage with the news. The rate ranges from $33-$40 per hour for 20-25 hours per week. Interested? Apply by March 8!

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Author-Editor Solidarity In The HarperCollins Strike: A Q&A with Emma Specter and Rachel Kambury

On February 16, the HarperCollins union announced that their members had voted to ratify a new contract with HarperCollins, putting an end to the union’s three month long strike over fair pay and working conditions. The agreement includes higher salary minimums to be phased in over time, reaching $50,000 in 2025. 

Hours before the results of the vote were announced, Study Hall Creative correspondent Meghan Racklin spoke with Emma Specter, an author with a book under contract at HarperCollins, and Rachel Kambury, an editor at HarperCollins and a picket captain for the strike, about the strike’s impact on authors, publishing unions, and building solidarity across the industry.

This conversation has been edited and shortened for clarity. 

Study Hall: Emma, can you talk a little bit about what the strike, and more generally what working with the only Big Five publishing house with a union, means for you as a writer? 

Emma Specter: Rachel is an absolute dream to work with. It shouldn’t be controversial to want higher wages — and all the other wonderful things that HarperCollins union is going to win in their new contract — for the people who make books happen. I can’t advocate for union protections at my day job, and then not support the only unionized publisher and the workers asking for the bare minimum of what they’re worth. [Editor’s note: Emma is a culture writer at Vogue and a steward in the Vogue union.]

Rachel Kambury: I was talking to a friend the other day about this, in the context of my acquisitions at HarperCollins, Emma’s book about binge eating disorder, and Arianna Rebolini’s book. These are both authors, writers, people whose talents I trust. I trust their minds, I trust everything about them. But I also had trust in the company that let me acquire them.

In both Emma’s and Arianna’s cases, we’re talking about books that are about incredibly sensitive topics. I told Emma on our first author call, “I’m committed to being at your side the entire way through, because I know how deeply affecting this kind of work can be and I don’t want you to ever feel like you are alone in this process.” And throughout the strike — the fact that it went on so long because this company refused to return to the negotiating table — they left authors like Emma out to dry, rather than acknowledge that they’re doing the wrong thing. That really, really pissed me off.

SH: What does it mean for writers to be working with a unionized publishing staff?

ES: I want the people that I work with to make enough money to live, and to live happily and comfortably, which is still a ways off for the publishing industry. It’s really hard to feel like you’re doing your best creative work when the people who are indispensable in helping you do it are not given a fair deal.

RK: On the picket line, we discussed how most publishing companies talk a really big game about author care. It was the case when I was at Hachette and it certainly is the case at HarperCollins. In all their memos, they said something like, “We care about authors, our first priority is authors.” But if your first priority is authors, you would not maintain a business with such a high degree of turnover. We’re not just talking about editorial, we’re talking about everything from editorial, to publicity, to marketing, to production, to audio, all of it.

This industry is hemorrhaging employees. And not only does that hurt the employees, it hurts the authors. We see that hurt in really tangible ways. I’ve known authors who have had three or four different editors on one book. And when it came down to negotiating a contract, I can’t think of anything more antithetical to author care than a publisher letting its workers be outside in the cold for 66 days.

ES: The company benefits from writers thinking of themselves as a protected class that shares nothing in common with their editors, the people who work on publicity, or the people who work on design. But we’re all interconnected. There’s this idea that we should be fighting one another, instead of looking at the companies that have the ability to pay us all fairly and are not doing it.

RK: There’s no ignoring the fact that a lot of the workers and authors that we’re talking about are women, trans, or queer. If you look at mastheads, it is still very much a boys’ club at the top, but all of the work — from the authors to production, and everything else — is done almost exclusively by women. The fact that we still have to fight to have women’s work fairly compensated and seen as important and as valuable as any work that any of these men did back when they actually worked on the books 20 or 30 years ago is very much part of the problem that we are facing as an industry.

SH: Can you talk about the kinds of requests you made of authors, reviewers, and agents, in terms of how they could support the strike? 

RK: We didn’t want a complete boycott, because we did not want to hurt the authors. If anyone’s going to get hurt, it should be us because we are the ones on strike. And it did hurt. I literally strained my back and had a really wicked cold, I lost like four weeks between December and January. But that’s the responsibility we took on when we went on strike. Asking people to withhold reviews was about not replacing union labor. Usually, when reviews are done, a union employee at HarperCollins has to read all of them, find the pull quotes, and then feed the pull quote into the system that feeds out onto all these online retailers. It’s essentially free publicity for the company. By withholding reviews, it sends a message to the company that the larger book community cares about this.

We didn’t expect or want the strike to go on as long as it did. The longer it went on, the more we started to see authors get upset and frustrated. And understandably so. For people who were already going to struggle getting healthy sales because they didn’t get the same amount of marketing or publicity budget as some big-name author, every single BookTok or review is valuable.

ES: Especially when it’s writers from marginalized backgrounds, it’s hard to see them not getting the press or the attention that they deserve. I’m just amazed at how, when you were freezing and there was no sense of how long it would go on, people were still thinking about how to do right by authors in a way that doesn’t shortchange the effort.

RK: One of my long-term goals in this industry is to make it more equitable for authors, as well. That includes things like marketing budgets, publicity budgets, and ensuring that that money gets spread around equitably. Authors were hurt by the strike because the company took forever to come back to the negotiating table. My hope is that the flurry of reviews and content that’s about to be unleashed, because of this thing ending, will make up for a lot of that hurt. This is a long game, and we are at an inflection point. I think if we hold together through to the other side of it, it’s going to make for a better industry.

ES: If the people reading submissions are mostly white and mostly wealthy, or possess enough of a vector of privilege to be able to work for less than $50,000 a year in New York, that’s not doing a service to writers, because then you hear feedback, like “Oh, I just didn’t relate to it” and “I don’t think there’s an audience for it” when it comes to books written by writers of color, queer writers, and trans writers. There is overlap between who can afford to do these jobs and who is making the decisions about what kind of work is relatable.

SH: Looking to the end of the strike and beyond, what can writers do to support a unionized publishing industry? 

ES: Union organizing is really hard work, but it’s the most meaningful work I’ve ever done, and unionizing has such a ripple effect. The best thing writers can do is show support for the gains that already exist, telegraphing that there will be support for people who might want to unionize but are worried. Something that I’ve seen in my own union efforts is people thinking, “Well, I like my immediate manager,” or “I like my job, why would I need a union?” And that’s great if that’s true for you, but that might not be true for everyone in your workplace. Union protections make a good situation permanent and not subject to the whims of your nice boss, who might quit tomorrow. We need to get to a place where it’s not scary or controversial to say “I support a fair shake for everyone who works with me.”

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TRAPPED IN THE PERCEPTION BOX: WTF IS ELIZABETH KOCH DOING

IT’S GIVING SCIENTOLOGY

I’ve never really had a burning desire to take ayahuasca at the Aspen Ideas Festival. However, after watching this video of Elizabeth Koch attempting to explain what the hell her Perception BoxTM  does, I understand how that experience would play out. The enlightened girlboss — who sounds like the QVC-version of Malcolm Gladwell — basically tries to make the concept of subjectivity sound novel. “It’s an invisible mental box that every human being alive lives inside that distorts our perceptions. It distorts our ability to understand one another and it distorts our ability to understand ourselves, and it’s made from the material of our beliefs,” she muses, gazing directly at the camera while sitting next to “Chief Scientist” Christof Koch, a vaguely professorial man wearing a boisterously colorful button down (I don’t think they are dating and/or related but?).

Koch talks and talks and talks, finding various syntactic ways to repackage this notion that all humans on God’s green earth are limited by their own consciousness. It all has a lulling, hypnotic effect that’s reminiscent of a sunkissed Scientologist seated at a booth on the Santa Monica Pier, waxing poetic about stress levels, John Travolta, and Xenu. A charitable reading is that Liz is projecting her family’s libertarian, fiercely individualistic politics onto her intellectual pursuits and needs to hire a “Chief Scientist” to validate her anxiety that none of this actually matters. Anyway, thank you Liz for teaching me how to be a person. —Daniel Spielberger

EVERYTHING IS PRISON IN THE PERCEPTION BOX

In 1975, the French philosopher Michel Foucault theorized that prisons come “from practically everywhere.” They “resemble our factories, schools, military bases, and hospitals — all of which in turn resemble prisons,” he wrote. Maybe even… the mind? Elizabeth Koch certainly identified with that, which is why she launched Perception Box. Drawing from Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish,” the billionaire heiress takes the concept of the prison out of our material world and into the depths of the conscious mind. Through her new venture, she argues that “everyone is a prisoner within their own conscious experience of perceived reality,” and asks us all to step outside our own Perception Box, lest we emerge as “the delinquent” of our minds. After learning more about my Perception Box and unlocking the uncharted landscape of my consciousness, I’m ready to discipline and punish my cognitive distortions. —Erin Corbett

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

—Hanif Abdurraqib is joining The New Yorker as a contributing writer. The Andrew Carnegie Medal recipient will cover music and culture.

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EVERYTHING ELSE

—Following cartoonist Scott Adams’ racist social media tirade, multiple American newspapers are dropping his “Dilbert” comic strips.

—The Birmingham News shut down its printed edition last week and will now solely be a digital operation. The Alabama newspaper was founded in 1888.

—Over the weekend, Elon Musk laid off 200 Twitter employees. Esther Crawford, the head of Twitter Blue who notoriously posted a photo of herself trying to catch a few spare Z’s in a sleeping bag on the office floor, was also let go.