field note from the trenches of american publishing

"I am complicit, I am in the wrong, particularly in light of my own experiences and values, but I am trapped in a commercial market. I like my paycheque."

Photo by Freddy Kearney on Unsplash

Like most career writers, many of the people I know work in publishing. A disproportionate number are American, simply because the USA is the global centre of the English-language bookselling market. Book people, by and large, tend to be clever, broadminded and reasonably progressive. They have opinions and they like to voice them openly, often with a cheap drink in hand.

Book people do not tend to conceal their opinions, since thinking and talking about pretty much everything, exploring ideas and learning, is akin to reading and writing — the two pursuits that almost invariably got them into the game in the first place. Most people who work in the industry do so for wages that are paltry compared to what they might be earning making and selling widgets instead of ideas. And while book people don’t always agree with all of the ideas they are party to publishing, the free dissemination of those ideas does matter — to most of them, anyway. Even in an industry beset by creative destruction and rapid change, this uniting principle seemed somehow unshakeable, unassailable. It kept the book people going, is what I mean.

But in recent months, within the American publishing industry, and certain specific states, this has begun to change. Many of my friends and colleagues are currently being tested by political and legal forces that have left them questioning the nature of their industry and chosen careers. The values they believed were implicit have suddenly shifted. And there is no room for debate.

The piece that follows is one anonymous account written by a trusted industry source — a person I have known for some time now. She works in textbooks — a huge portion of the industry for reasons that are self-evident. It’s pretty shocking but rest assured there many, many others like it. In recent months I have been privy to more stories like this than I can count. Even unnamed, the author of this piece is putting herself, her paycheque — and by extension her family — on the line. Juvenescence is a small publishing-friendly platform, but what follows is a brave undertaking. I’m honoured to publish it.

I urge you to read it and if you haven’t already, to please show your support by subscribing and sharing widely (if that’s your thing). Comments are only open to paid subscribers.

Field Note From the Book Trenches of America

By Anonymous

I got into educational publishing because I had a degree I didn’t know what to do with, I like to read, and, having done my slog through the K-20 education space, it felt familiar. It also seemed slightly more glamorous than being a teacher: New York editorial meetings, sneakers and suits on the subway. I’m now more than 20 years into my publishing career and it has mostly treated me well, although I discovered New York can mean a far-flung borough, and the sneakers and suits are worn ironically now. I have slept peacefully at night all these years knowing I have contributed to the education of America’s youth.

I work in the middle: I am not in a role that talks to the market and I am not in the C suite that makes decisions. I read drafts and I write emails and I take meetings and I listen to the people who do talk to the market and I report up to the people who do make the decisions. There are surveys and polls and focus groups and first proofs and second proofs and marketing and sales meetings. We talk to teachers, we look at the state standards, we build a book, we sell the book. That’s the job. I have worked for 5 publishers over 22 years in varying roles, but that’s basically the formula.

What I never anticipated 22 years ago on my first day as a publishing intern: that I would end up having a complicit role in the censorship of American education. And yet, yesterday, based on emails I myself had written and content I myself had flagged, our legal counsel advised that we pull material from Florida because of LGBTQ+ references that contravened the newly expanded “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The material in question is designed for 12th grade and is in the Social Sciences arena. The content in question talks about family structures.

I think back to my own Ani Difranco days at my liberal university; or later, to Top 20 Katy Perry’s kissing a girl and liking it: my generation of friends, in the circles I came of age, we all fooled around and it was all normal. Later, my friend Kathleen would marry our friend Jessie and later still, they would have a baby with their gay male best friends. We tittered about the turkey baster but the actual relationships were not ever questioned, two moms, two dads, the baby. A family structure. They probably live in Vermont now and send Christmas cards; I’ve lost touch.

Here's how it goes: there’s a big commercial machine called EDUCATION in America. There are three big cogs driving the revenue machine: California, Texas, and Florida. In California, you’d better be showing diverse family structures. Not only should family structure be representative, it’s great if you can throw in a disabled person and a rainbow. In Texas, you’d better follow those Texas standards. If the standard says teach how family structures economically support basic human need, you best have it in the book to be taught. And in Florida – well, the governor says Don’t Say Gay and 1/3 of your core revenue comes from the Sunshine State, you stop saying Gay and you don’t acknowledge same-sex marriages as a mainstream option. That’s just what you have to do, to keep the machine running.

I’d have objected more about this, but I went to a conference last month and talked to a teacher in Florida whose best friend had just been managed out as a media studies teacher because she hadn’t complied with the law. As she told me about her friend, the teacher lowered her voice to a whisper and gave a furtive glance behind her. The fear is real. People are losing their livelihoods over this, teachers are getting caught slipping same sex content into lesson plans, parents are finding literature left on the shelves of libraries and protesting at school board meetings to get librarians fired. How can I insist on my company providing material that gets people fired? How can I insist on material that will just be taken off the shelf altogether if I am successful in keeping the content in the book? I want students in Florida to have teachers and books. I can only support that if I too comply with the guidelines and sanitize the curriculum for use in that state. And it’s not just Florida: there are nudity guidelines in Virginia, obscenity guidelines in Tennessee, all gaining political heft and making their way onto the agendas of publishing board meetings all over the nation; should we remove that image of a statue that shows a curve of thigh? These are market decisions to be made, commercial decisions, and I can tell you, I am not the only publisher with liberal values swallowing the protest in my throat.

I talked to my family about writing this, and I was advised to keep my head down. “What will it accomplish?” I argued that voices need to be heard, I believe in storytelling, and that I think I am on the wrong side of history with this one. I wanted to take a minute and explain to myself, and to my children, and to those LGBTQ+ students in Florida: I know am complicit, I am in the wrong, particularly in light of my own experiences and values, but I am trapped in a commercial market that responds to budgets and funding set at the state level – and I like my paycheck.

Tomorrow I will go back to my mundane tasks: the budgets, the funding, the business cases and the like. But today, I am taking a minute to just acknowledge this: I never envisioned 22 years ago on my first day at my new career in publishing that I would ever have a hand in suppressing content. My vision wasn’t necessarily to educate the youth of America that first day – as I said, I just kind of fell into this work. But up until now I have felt proud of my small contribution to the American education landscape; today that feeling has ended.