“Well,” one might ask looking back over the last few days, “don’t you feel silly for doubting those “end of publishing” warnings now?” To which we would have to say, as before: No, not really.
Yes, this has been a lousy week in New York (and Nashville, and Orlando), which has dished out lousy treatment even to people universally recognized within the industry as deserving of better than this. We understand why events have created a climate of pervasive anxiety for ourselves and for our friends and colleagues, but once we work through that instinctive fear, we find ourselves returning to the optimistic vision of Heather Schroeder at ICM, who assured her client authors yesterday that “however this shakes out in the short term… we are going to come out the other side of this better than we were before,” because “there will always be people who will want to write, there will always be people who want to publish those writers and there will always be a public that wants to read.”
We know that good people are giving great consideration to what can be done from this point and where we might find success. And we think back to something we wrote in September:
“Nobody’s arguing that the publishing industry is going to stay the way it is, or that it can’t benefit from the major revamping that’s on the way. But that’s hardly the same thing as saying we’re at “the end.” … Also, it’s worth remembering that the publishing industry’s sun does not rise and fall on less than a dozen buildings scattered around Manhattan, or who does or does not have an office in one of those buildings on any given day.”
If that last sentence (which originally referred only to the departure of two CEOs) sounds somewhat callous after everything that’s happened this week, we apologize—but we also encourage readers to remember that there is more to the publishing industry than the conglomerates in New York, and that even though independent publishers are themselves not immune to the economic pressures, many are prepared to press on and carve out a unique space for themselves because they don’t want to live in a world where the books they love aren’t available for others to read. They may press on cautiously, and slowly, and they may not gain huge ground most years, but they will persevere, as will their equally passionate counterparts at the larger houses, because they must. And we hope that, through such perseverance, opportunities emerge for those of our colleagues whose careers were disrupted this week.