Writerly Things with Brooke Warner

Dear ____, the email reads, I want to start with something that stood out immediately. Praise, praise, praise, praise, praise . . . and yet, your rankings are low and I can help. If you’re an author, you likely receive countless of these breathy emails every week.

It’s negative times, and during negative times you feel it. On the heart and minds of everyone is negativity. Everything reinforces how bad things are. Things used to be better, and everyone wants you to know it. I was 23 when I started in book publishing in 2000, and for a while I had the luxury of working and learning without anyone telling me how much better it used to be.

Back when I was fielding memoir submissions for Seal Press in the late 2000s, I developed a sixth sense. An internal lie detector, if you will. I’d get a book proposal that was so unbelievable that it was both cringey and funny. My colleagues and I would read parts of the most egregious proposals aloud at editorial meetings. Call it what you will, but it was a way to blow off steam. People often say, If it’s too good to be true . . . But you rarely hear the opposite: If it’s too bad to be true . . .

A sampling of She Writes Press covers Book publishers have an interesting job. We do a lot of things, but above all else, we are author therapists, author whisperers, and author wranglers. In my work with authors, I let them know up front that the place we’re most likely to tangle, if we do, is on cover design. As such, I want to use this post to get under the hood on cover design, and to offer some guidance on how to give feedback.

It’s been a big but tragic week rife with AI book publishing scandals. Kathleen Schmidt, who covers a lot of these kinds of stories on Publishing Confidential, recently wrote that things cannot go on like this. But they will go on like this for a good long while because book publishing at large has no agreed-upon AI policy.

For the past 9 years, She Writes Press has been hosting our STEP (She Writes Press Toward Equality in Publishing) contest to elevate writers of color—and submissions are now open through September 10! This contest started with a recognition—that the book publishing industry at large is very white, that the majority of authors getting publishing deals were white, and that our own list needed a good dose of diversity.

We live in a weird world. Five years ago, if you’d asked the average person working on a book project if they liked the idea of a robot generating their stories or their personal narratives for them, I think you’d have been met with bug eyes. It wasn’t even a thing—and what would be the point, right? Anyone who’s graduated from college, never mind high school, knows that passing someone else’s work off as your own has a name, and it results in a failing grade to boot.

If you had asked me one year ago to comment on the importance of Sarah Wynn Williams’s memoir, Careless People, to the genre, I wouldn’t have had all that much to say. It’s an exposé of Facebook. Facebook (now Meta) has proven itself to be a pretty shitty company. Mark Zuckerberg makes an ass of himself every time he posts or speaks or launches a new initiative or compromises his integrity.

The idea for this post has been sitting with me for a couple months, so I’m taking you back to April, when I attended the Publishing Professionals Network conference in my hometown of Berkeley, California, with Jane Friedman keynoting. The title of her talk, “What Is the Publisher For?” was bold given that she was presenting to a roomful of publishing professionals. Jane and I have come up in publishing on parallel paths. We’re about the same age with the same number of years in the industry.

Everyone is looking for reasons why book sales are down. It’s a topic of constant conversation among my publishing colleagues, my meetings with my distributor, and also my friends who read. And, there’s not one answer. It’s the economy. It’s our dwindling attention spans. It’s the steady stream of content we’re consuming from other sources that are not books.