Gatekeepers

“Everybody is trying to sell the project to the next person in line.”

Jenna Johnson, Executive Editor, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Nora and I and our friend went down to the Southern Vermont Arts Center yesterday, to see the Red Dress exhibition. Highly recommended.

But that’s not my job in this space. What I want to talk about is the gift shop. Museum gift shops mostly contain the same array of stuff. Books and small objects related to the current exhibit. Arts and crafts by local professionals. Kids toys that promote creativity. And books about art in general. All of it aimed at people who’ve just had their ideas challenged or their eyes pleased, and who imagine staying in that state just a little bit longer.

So I bought a book. A Year in the Art World: An Insider’s View, by Matthew Israel. It’s a fascinating look into the world of people who make art, who make art possible, and who make art “important.” Each of its fifteen brief chapters is dedicated to one example of a field involved in the value chain of fine art. The first of those chapters is about “the artist.” The other fourteen are not.

Fabricators, gallery directors, museum directors, art fairs, artist estates, art writers, curators, biennial exhibitions, art schools, art online, art advisors, auction houses, conservators, and shippers/warehousers. Fourteen separate industries dependent on the fragile work of that first one, back there with the sketchpad and the weird ideas.

Some substantial majority of those players have to agree that the artist has done something important in order for the artist to enter the contemporary conversation. In some ways, it’s akin to the peer review process in academia, in which a bunch of specially-trained professionals exercise their informed judgement on work within their field.

The way it differs, though, is important. And that difference is that they all need to make money from the transaction. So their judgment of the work is always ecological, about the work within the contemporary market. “There’s no market for it” is a low consideration to the artist, and crucial to each of the other fourteen.

---

Let’s look at how this plays out in books. I’ll use my 2019 book The Adjunct Underclass as an example.

I’d written an earlier book, The PhDictionary, that was published through the University of Chicago Press. I had a clear audience in mind for that one: young adults in grad school or having recently gotten their PhDs, who had come from outside the higher ed industry and thus didn’t know any of the unspoken rules and customs that would come back to smack them in the face if they stepped the wrong way. That book did okay, selling 1,411 copies as of June 30 of this year. But my editor at Chicago, the brilliant Elizabeth Branch Dyson, knew the market, and asked me to write a book that wouldn’t have occurred to me on my own.

So I did. I conducted all of the research and had all of the ideas and wrote all of the text. I was supported in that work by the equivalent of the fabricators: Elizabeth giving me conceptual guidance, and the gifted (and patient) copy editor Renaldo Migaldi making sure that my text was both correct and elegant.

But after it left my hands, it entered a machine that I’d never considered.

Elizabeth had already gained approval for the book by the Press’s editorial team and its board of directors, but once it was near the finish line, she passed it off to two other groups: production and marketing. On the production side, the book designer created a comfortable page logic and a lovely cover, and then it went to a print shop. But on the marketing side: Wow.

They generated a list of a hundred or so reviewers who would each get a free copy. They made posters for the London Book Fair, where the Press introduced its Spring 2019 releases, and sent one or more folks to that event as well. They carted the book off to other trade shows in higher ed and in education research. They pitched the book to major bookseller chains, and to major book distributors. They plowed and fertilized so that the book’s tender little seed might sprout.

Then the reviewers themselves went to work. Some of them were within the world of literature, some within the world of higher ed, some within the world of labor relations. Each of them put the book into conversation with their own thinking and interests, and presented the resulting discussions to their own readership.

Booksellers themselves. From the Amazon behemoth down to the small indy shops, individual buyers had to decide whether and how many. (A couple of those stores invited me to come talk, which was fun, too.) How and where do those books get placed within the vast snowdrifts of ideas that comprise every good bookstore? Is it “new and notable,” or is it just slotted spinewise on its designated shelf, elbowing its way into the crowd like a subway passenger in the morning rush?

And then, finally, readers. Thank you. I’ve made some good friends through that book, people who would otherwise have been completely unknown to me but who have become trusted voices through our correspondence.

As of June 30, that book has been translated into traditional and modernized Chinese, and made into an audiobook. In its original form, it’s sold 4,275 copies, 71 of which (1.7%) were during the most recent fiscal year. Its current Amazon ranking is #647,157 of all books. Now four years old, it’s entered the geriatric phase of its life, available at half price twice a year from the Press’s warehouse sales.

There have been so many people along the way, each of whom had to decide that the book was worthy of participating in their discourse. I’m grateful to all of them, but it makes me aware of just how big, and how selective, the machine is. And how many good writers won’t get through the doors.