Our guest speaker for this year’s RWA/NYC's Spring Brunch was Melissa Ann Singer, a senior editor at Tor/Forge with over
40-years experience in the industry. When she stood up and announced she would
be speaking about cultural changes in publishing, the room fell silent to
listen.
She started with an anecdote about
nearly being fired her first day on the job—for refusing to get someone coffee.
(Now, she says, everyone gets their own coffee.) At the time, she knew all the
women in publishing, because there weren’t that many. And the women who’d risen
to the top? They had to be hardasses, because the only way to make it big was
to be tougher than the men. (And there were inevitably rumors that you’d slept
your way to the position.) Judith Regan was the first woman to get an imprint
named after her, and it was a big news item when it happened.
This has, thankfully, changed a lot.
Now, there are lots of women in positions of power in publishing, although the
really high levels are still male-dominated. (This is changing, she says.) But
there are still other challenges to be tackled within publishing culture.
She talked candidly about diversity
in the workplace (or lack thereof) during her 30+ years at Tor, and the effort
being made to improve—although they still have a ways to go. Publishing as a
business is more than just words on the page, so when she’s hiring, she looks
for other skills in a person’s education and resume—not necessarily an English
degree, but experience in areas like marketing, or even retail. She’s
encouraging Tor to do more outreach at the high school level, and the publisher
is also reaching out to historically black colleges through job fairs. One of
the difficulties is turnover rate for entry level positions—it’s only every two
to three years.
Another difficulty is the pay that’s
offered for these positions. A position that paid $8,000 per year in the 1970s
now pays $30,000, which is about the same when adjusted for inflation. She says
that won't change because the business runs on a tight margin, but the benefits
are much better these days, even if the pay is not.
Tor/Forge is owned by Macmillan,
which is privately held. This makes a huge difference, as they don't have
to satisfy all the stockholders, and it’s not as driven by hierarchy. Editorial
is run like an apprenticeship business, but these days, Macmillan is doing more
to train management and regulate training, without removing creativity.
The biggest worry right now is the
death of the mass market paperback. There was always a 60% return rate on mass
markets. (I worked at a bookstore for six years, and I’m very familiar with
“stripping” mass markets.) Before, it was normal to print half a million
copies, and it was a waste of time to print 20,000. Now, 20,000 is a big deal.
Mass markets have lost lots of the outlets that carried them, thanks to the
collapse of the magazine industry, which took mass markets with them. Most
supermarkets and other such retailers only take bestsellers, and don't want to
take a chance on genre fiction—even though genre drives the industry.
She says the people writing articles
and think pieces slinging mud at genre fiction don't get the impact of pop
culture on society. Fiction broadens the horizons of writers and readers. How
else do you imagine a culture not your own if you're not introduced to it? The
more you read, the more you open your mind. Studies have shown that people who
read fiction have more empathy. And she believes that people who write genre
fiction are going to change the world.
It was an honest talk, inspiring in
its candor, with an underlying tone of “we need to do more.” And it made me
wonder: what else could we be doing as authors to support cultural changes in
publishing? In the meantime, we can continue to support groups like We Need
Diverse Books (WNDB), who are doing a lot of the groundwork, and boost the
signal of existing own voices titles.
Big thanks to Melissa Ann Singer for
coming to speak at our brunch. You can find her on Twitter at @maseditor.♥
Alexis Daria’s Golden
Heart®-nominated debut contemporary romance will be released in 2017 from SMP
Swerve. On Sunday evenings, Alexis co-hosts #RWchat, a weekly Twitter chat for
romance writers. She also serves as PRO Liaison for the New York City chapter
of RWA, and Municipal Liaison for the NYC region of National Novel Writing
Month. She loves social media, and you can find her as @alexisdaria on Twitter,
Instagram, and Pinterest, @alexidaria1 on Facebook, and follow her blog,
alexisdaria.com.
PHOTOS FROM THE BRUNCH
A Good Time Was Had By All
READ ROMANCE
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