Fly on the wall reflection: The zen of book publishing
I was talking to my friend earlier today who told me how her life could only be viewed in chunks of present time because if she focused on the long view, she’d be despondent. I teased her and said she was like the bumper sticker that people in recovery like to don on their cars that says, “one day at a time.” I told her that by default, she was living a very zen life.
Some people suffer for years by sitting in meditation on hard floors to get to this point. Starving themselves, not speaking for weeks.
I had my own tales to tell about how my life also needed to be digested in small bites for fear of going off the deep end into extreme worry and fear. And, I was just referencing my personal life.
If you shift the focus over to publishing and what’s going on there, you could lose your mind when you look very far down its dim and bumpy road. It’s not so much that its wheels are falling off, it’s more like the asphalt is disintegrating behind and under every roll of the wheel. There’s only uncertainty up ahead and if the industry doesn’t keep flexing, it could become something unrecognizable.
Maybe even nonexistent.
Like Facebook and Twitter, we’re learning as we go along. We don’t know exactly why, but we plod away with the culture wave. In publishing we don’t know how people will ingest their books in the future, even the near future. We’re seeing a lot of choices to make whether it be reading by Kindle, or Nook, on our iphone screens or in our favorite and trusty cloth and paper packages. We just don’t know what will prevail.
Scarier than all that, we wonder about book reading altogether. Are we replacing our cover to cover habits with smaller doses of information from a wider range of sources? And, is that a good or bad thing?
All these unknowns.
Those of us peddling books in their conventional format, while our IT departments explore the virtual and science fiction side of things, are puzzled with a capital P. It takes no effort at all to reach the place of stress and that can happen quite naturally without even factoring in our volatile economy.
Wow. I’m actually starting to freak myself out!
Enter the zen part of this message. Zen to the rescue. Like the scary places in our lives outside of publishing, when we look too hard at the big picture, we can spin out into overwhelm. Will we have jobs? Will they still have jobs we can recognize with the usual titles and duties? What media will matter to us publicists in influencing a sale and what exactly will we be selling?
Zen.
One slice at a time. Not taking a confined or myopic view, letting in the ideas that affect the future of our industry. Learning what there is to learn. But for our sanity’s sake, staying focused on the matters in front of us. One foot in front of the other. One megabyte in front of the next. One download at a time.
Humans have always feared being replaced by robots but this is different. I’m just hoping that the human capacity to revel in the smell of paper pages and devour whole books doesn’t go extinct. Even if the strings of words are flying across an electronic screen.
We’re in the ADD phase of the information age and nobody knows where we will land.
Keep reading books. Keep buying books. Keep not only your bookstores (I can hardly say local indies anymore) and your publishers in business.
I really like my job.
Especially when I do it in prayer position, standing on one foot and chanting.
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Deep breath (inhale, exhale). The thought of paperless books makes me sad – the smell of a book is enough to turn my day from bad to good! Let’s hope paper books never go away. In the meantime, I’ll remember to breathe!
This is an excellent post and a magnificent view from the inside.
One thing I think is certain in the uncertainty is that there will always be a thirst for knowledge, and a quest for self-improvement. It is the nature of humanness. The day this stops being true is the day the we have all ceased to be human. And that is not going to happen in the lifetimes of anybody reading this blog in present time.
So the challenge is to look at the crumbling asphalt and instead of seeing a pothole of death that will consume all that is familiar and good, to see that the asphalt must give way in order to provide an opening to something more expanded – so expanded that we have a hard time imagining how it will take form. Within the excitement of any new possibility is the terrifying uncertainty of a reality not yet manifested.
There is always the choice to keep a death grip on the familiar because it provides the illusion of security, but the only security that really exists is the artful ability of going with the flow. Resistance is futile. And really… is that the kind of people we really want to be?
Kim,
Terrific. I think a little “zen” is what we all need as we attempt to navigate the most uncertain waters of the book world.
And I loved this line:
“We’re in the ADD phase of the information age and nobody knows where we will land.”
When I read this yesterday morning, I was feeling the same thing, and it was more than a bit anxiety-provoking. It was a good reminder to remove myself from all the possible outcomes and just do the next indicated thing. (I seem to recall hearing that somewhere.)
I started in this business as a typesetter. I don’t think the occupation exists anymore. I know the equipment I worked with — filmstrip fonts and hot wax machines — aren’t used in the making of books anymore.
Ideas have to get passed from person to person, and writing is still one of the most refined ways to do that. But you might have to keep reinventing yourself and your business to ride the line between authors and readers.
Zen enough?
STEVE O’KEEFE
The new generation of digital media is mostly good for consumers and students. I just finished writing my thesis, which involved an extensive literature review. I was able to do ALL my research via the university’s online library service — and I did this from my home computer. Twenty years ago I would have been camped in a library for DAYS doing this research.
For publishers, on the other hand, figuring out how to compete and be profitable with digital media has been an uphill battle. And look what has happened to the newspaper industry — it seems to be on its last legs. The new issue of Vanity Fair has an article about Rupert Murdock and how he is trying to force publishers to make consumers pay for newspaper content. Will be interesting to watch!
Just thinking this myself this morning. Just focus on the kitchen, then move to the dining room.