We finally got a chance to take a close look at this year’s Publishing Trends survey of industry professionals—half of us enjoy the work for the intellectual challenges, and the free books don’t hurt, either!—and a full 81.5 percent of those surveyed say “publishing jobs in general are less secure than they were a year ago,” while more than 33 percent are worried specifically about hanging on to their own jobs. Asked to reflect further on their future, the number of people who’d like to quit their jobs and become agents is nearly equal to the number of people who are happy where they’re at… but 28 percent say they can’t decide until they find out who’s going to be running the country for the next four years. On the off chance that you can’t already guess how their hopes skew, 86 percent say they’re voting for Barack Obama.
Not all the survey questions made it into the newsletter report, so the Publishing Trends blog is running additional results, from which you can learn that red wine is favored over white wine 2-to-1, and word of mouth is overwhelmingly the most frequent way publishing industry pros land staff jobs. More such tidbits are promised throughout October.