It's Called Hanging Out

3 things that could make the world of books more human

Main Meal

Hello my friends,

I’m in Portugal teaching at the DISQUIET International Literary Program so this will be a quickie but hopefully a goodie. Basically I’m interested today in asking if there are a few things that could make the world of being in books — as a reader, bookseller, editor, agent, and yes, writer — more humane. No big deal.

First of all, do you subscribe to Galley Brag by

Ezra Kupor

? If not, why not? Ezra is an editor at Harper Collins where he edits fiction and nonfiction including by wonderful folks like

Tembe Denton-Hurst

, Emet North, Chloe Caldwell & others. But most important for today’s purposes, Ezra’s Substack features Bookish Humans Trying to Do Something Different in the literary landscape, things that add humanity, understanding and peace rather than detract from them, hehe.

Ezra was kind enough to have me on his Substack and you can read our full conversation here. We GOT INTO IT. But for the busy bees, here are 3 cliffs notes, 3 things that we talked about that I wish were being talked about more:

1. The book world would be more humane if more people were getting their basic financial needs met, and to do that we need collective action, not individual people helping individual people.

Emma Copley Eisenberg: So, that's something I'm always thinking about, too, like, how do I offer something to people in a mutually beneficial way, where we both get what we need? And the answer for that does start to feel bigger and I start thinking more and more about unionizing. I've been doing work with the National Writers Union (NWU) recently and thinking about health insurance because that's my biggest pain point in my financial life: my body, basically. I don't understand why the WGA and screenwriters can achieve this level of institutional support that literary writers cannot.

Ezra Kupor: Wait. So there is a union that literary writers can join?

ECE: Yes. It's the NWU. I literally just learned about this. The Author's Guild is great, and they obviously do a ton, but I got involved with the NWU through the Freelance Solidarity Project, which operates under the NWU. They work more with digital media and freelancer issues, but the NWU does have a books division, and it's coming back.

I feel like it's thriving and more and more people are joining. So, I'm trying to get more involved and understand more about what other literary writers and book writers want and need.

I'm very new to it, but I feel like that’s what I’m trying to put my energy towards right now. The individual relationships are absolutely still important, but everyone is drowning and we need more than just individual goodwill at this point.

2. Real relationships and communication are key — publishers communicating to readers, editors communicating to authors, and authors communicating among ourselves. Siloed communication is by design to keep all of us separated from vital information.

ECE: I feel like there's this misunderstanding that publishers can't influence bookish TikTok because it's “organic.” And that really bothers me because it's like saying we can't influence, like, anything. So, I feel like there's this kind of all-or-nothing approach where it's either like, TikTok is super transactional where we’ll pay for reviews and make sponsored content, or we’ll drop our hands and do nothing.

And I'm like, there's this middle ground, my friends…

EK: …it's called trying.

ECE: It's called trying! Like, it's literally called trying. And it's literally called listening, like you said. Like, it's just hanging out [and seeing what readers want out of a real place of curiosity]. Like, no one’s hanging out anymore...I wish that there was just a little bit more of a sense of communication, Ezra. Communication. Like, my kingdom for people to communicate in a transparent way. All I'm asking for is someone to just be like, here's a few major dates for a few major tasks, now go do them. And I'm like, of course. I would love to. But, if I don't know what they are, then I can't do them.

EK: Yes. Okay. So, to fix publishing, we need to be hanging out more and communicating?

ECE: [Yes!] From your perspective, though, what do you attribute to the deep inability to communicate clearly within publishing? What do you think that's about?

EK: Well, I don’t want to blame it all on the fact that—as a whole—publishing is understaffed. But I do think that editors are seen as the translators across all departments, or at least the filter through which a lot of the communication moves. Down the line, marketing and publicity will likely be in contact with the author directly, but a lot of times it is the editor who is the main author-facing communicator. So, editors can sometimes become stopgaps because either they are waiting to respond until they have answers from a different team (who are then waiting for answers from a different team, etc.) or the editor becomes so overwhelmed with the sheer amount of work/incoming emails/submissions that they literally stop being able to communicate.

And, like you were saying, I think a lot of the communication breakdowns could be avoided if the base level of understandings of publishing were more widely known. Like—as of now—authors are kinda just in the dark until they get a book deal, and then they have to wait to receive information as it comes up. But, if there was more public information about how a book gets made and what to expect, authors wouldn’t feel as reliant on editors to communicate every directive.

3. We need to leave behind old beliefs about what works — what readers want and don’t and why — and when we try something new and with the intention to be inclusive, we need to really try it in good faith and track the results.

EK: It’s like, we can only publish four queer authors, but we can publish a hundred books about people going on vacation to Maine? All that being said, there are things that can work for a certain kind of book. But if you then apply that same approach to a book that is doing something totally different—that is meant to reach a different audience—and it doesn't work, that doesn't mean that the book didn’t work. It means that your approach didn't work.

When I was talking to [

Traci Thomas

of The Stacks], she had brought up this explosion of books by Black authors in 2022 and how the majority of them were not positioned for success at all. And instead of being like, let's actually do a case study where we look back and see what we did and what didn’t work, a lot of publishers were like, well, I guess books like that don’t work.

The same approach to everything can work, but it often doesn’t. So, why don’t we look back at what was done, dissect it, and then use that information and knowledge to inform resources for books moving forward? Instead of just looking solely at the sales track and being like, this didn’t sell, so no more books like this.

It feels like publishing wants to move forward, but it doesn't want to drop its vestigial tail. We can proceed forward, but there are many things we have to let go in order to do so. There are many core things that are important to preserve, but there are a lot that no longer serve us and we can’t lug all of that around with us. We have to adapt, and we have to think on our toes.

Toppings

• I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Colored Television by Danzy Senna. It’s chatty, trenchant, sad, bizarre, and I’m not even done yet. I can feel the novel hurling its narrator, Jane, a bi-racial novelist who’s turned to TV writing during a crisis of faith, over the cliff and I’m watching through my fingers to see how she lands. The narrator, Kristen Ariza, seems to have also performed all of Senna’s previous novels except her debut, Caucasia. I’m always interested in the relationship between a writer and their audiobook narrator and this seems like a lovely, long-running one.

• I’m teaching: an 8! Day! Retreat! in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico October 4-11 for people who want support to dive into a fiction project or just a stretch of time to focus on writing and be in a beautiful place. Family-owned villa, trip to hot springs, queer friendly & body neutral—no diet talk! More info is here.

  

• I’ve been clicking: this link to help save SEPTA, Philly’s transit system, from catastrophic cuts ahead of the June 30 voting deadline and this link to read Kaveh Akbar’s words about how Americans can resist complicity in Israel’s attacks on Iran.

• I want to plug: dear friend Annie Liontas’ podcast LitFriends where I was recently featured with my lit friends Hilary Leichter (Temporary, Terrace Story) and Denne Michele Norris (When the Harvest Comes) talking about the writing life, jealousy, the necessity of friendship in literary community & more. Normally the pod highlights iconic writer duos like Edmund White (RIP) and Yiyun Li or Justin Torres and Angela Fluornoy; we were their first throuple and longest episode — never been prouder.

That’s all!

xx

Emma

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