Monday, February 24, 2020

Publishing thoughts


Right now I have a couple different areas of specific interest/questions that I’ve been thinking about.

First, as someone who’s very interested in editing—copy editing in particular, but all forms of editing as well—I was really struck by our discussions about how editing plays into ideas of ownership and authorship (and the distinction between the two, if it exists). I’d love to explore these ideas further—how do these concepts look from the editorial side? From the author’s perspective? From the reader’s perspective?

I also did my first co-op at a startup that was essentially a marketing platform for self-published and independent authors. Working closely with a lot of the authors on our platform gave me a really different perspective on the publishing world than what I originally came into the job with. I’m fascinated by the differences between authors who self-publish or publish independently and those who take the traditional publishing route (for instance, for many self-published authors, the mailing list is king; reviews are emphasized and valued more highly; many self-published authors—on our platform, at least—had certain ideas about what a reader “owed” them for a copy of or excerpt from their book; and so on). Both trade publishing and self-publishing seem to have their own little niche worlds and idiosyncrasies, and yet these microcosms differ so greatly despite the fact that they are just different areas of the same field. I don’t have fully articulated questions about these differences at the moment, but would love to look further into those as well.

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