Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good
No? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds the demand. There are lots of causes of that imbalance and most of them have nothing to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. It's also hard to get a job in the abusive video game development industry!
Where does the supply come from? You could still argue that people choose this as a career when they have the choice of better-paid ones, increasing the supply of people with the smarts and training needed by the publishers.
I don't know if that's what's happening, but it might work towards TFA's point.
It probably has to do with the fact that we condition children and adolescents to consider white-collar jobs as more noble than blue-collar jobs, then we tell them that to get a good white-collar job, they need a degree... and then we make STEM degrees hard by subjecting students to more math than most people realistically need. So we have a lot of frontend developers who know calculus and an oversupply of people with humanities degrees.
With that degree, you're generally pushed toward jobs in journalism, publishing, graphic design, teaching, administrative functions, and so on. Most of these pay relatively little.
Calculus is required for English degrees in other countries. Heck a lot of countries require some amount of calculus just to graduate high school.
Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies, to making informed medical decisions.
I don't think it's a matter of more 'noble', simply a more comfortable option if it's available to you. It has historically paid better and taken a lower toll on your body. The former is now less true, but the latter is still a big issue.
It's a shame that calculus isn't required by every college degree. Just because I'm not integrating functions during my normal work, doesn't mean I don't benefit from understanding the fundamental principles.
Most people don't have the "choice" of being an engineer or software developer currently.
To be blunt, it's much easier for the majority of the population to get an English degree or some other generic liberal arts degree and therefore be qualified for an entry level job in the publishing industry.
I'm sure someone somewhere is giving up a highly lucrative job to roll the dice on the next great American novel, but it's not a meaningful number.
The specific analogy doesn't hold but the sentiment does.
Instead of using Palantir, working at the FSF, the Linux Foundation, etc. It's not that they don't make good money, it's that it's often a fraction of what could be made at a comparable for profit company.
I think the video game industry is an apt comparison. The pay is often not very good with the motivation being, for many people, prestige based, in some form or another. I suspect there are analogies in the game industry and publishing 50-100 years ago.
Wouldn’t the supply of labor for a role or company increase if what the company do, books or video games, is associated to what most people see as good, therefore, they are more willing to build their long term skill sets in?
That perceived associated goodness is what caused the increase in qualified candidates in the first place?
Some of it has to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. A lot of those jobs involve holding people's hands, "emotional labor", like nursing and teaching. These jobs are seen as something people (women, mostly) should do because they like being carers, rather than for the money. These jobs end up being paid less than they are really worth, especially since they often involve many hours without compensation.
That's hardly the only factor here. In the end it's really about the fact that we appear to have an infinite appetite for blowing people up. ($1.5 trillion, next year, a full 50% increase at a time when we're supposedly needing to cut back.)
But don't discount the thumb on the scale against jobs like these. It's a persistent problem in many industries -- so pervasive that it just looks natural.
I hope The Martian becomes the template of a new publishing world. Andy Weir couldn't get any publisher's attention until he self published and achieved 35,000 sales in three months without their help. He succeeded by word of mouth and not publisher's marketing.
Almost all of the fiction I read comes by personal recommendations. Including from social media like Hacker News. I haven't stood in a bookstore browsing shelves and reading blurbs in many years but I read more than ever.
A publisher provides marketing, editing and distribution. Literary marketing is becoming better in the peer-to-peer form than the old business-to-consumer form. Distribution has become unbundled via self-publishing. Editing is no less important than ever, but it would be so much better if the value from such an individual art can be captured by those talented individuals rather than by corporate.
Long live literature, but may Big Publishing fade away into obsolescence.
This kind of reminds me of the book Get Shorty and the subsequent movie. About a mafia loan shark moving to hollywood and becoming a producer.
Elmore Leonard was very familiar with movie producers by that point in his career, and clearly saw a a funny similarly between what a mob does and how Hollywood operates.
At the same time, the book is almost a tender mark of appreciation towards the role a producer plays. It's one of the few stories that spotlights what a producer actually does and shows it's importance in greasing the wheels enough to actually make a movie.
There are many hyper-credentialized, gatekept systems but most of them don't share the feature of producing structurally worse outcomes as literary fiction. I believe this system is already selling the seeds of its own demise.
A small group of agents hold most of the power, and the system has confused power for taste. This has also, in my experience, led to the outlets that hold the most power using that power to push agendas instead of seeking out the best literature. I do not believe this can persist indefinitely.
> ...the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good, something that serves humanity, while Palantir designs software that the government uses to find targets for drone strikes. Jobs at Random House are much harder to get than jobs at Palantir, even though jobs at Random House are paid much more poorly.
An interesting take, particularly the assertion that "jobs at Random House are much harder to get than jobs at Palantir." I'd be absolutely 100% shocked if that were true.
Generally, the more a job pays, the harder it is to get hired. These are generally correlated with job-obtaining-difficulty:
Most books are loss leaders for publishing houses very few are profitable and even fewer are massively profitable. They keep publishing books that barely anybody reads because they have to have a diverse catalog.
That was worth the read. I did get a bit lost when the writer was talking about the different areas, prestige fiction, commercial fiction, nonprofit fiction.
79 comments
No? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds the demand. There are lots of causes of that imbalance and most of them have nothing to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. It's also hard to get a job in the abusive video game development industry!
I don't know if that's what's happening, but it might work towards TFA's point.
With that degree, you're generally pushed toward jobs in journalism, publishing, graphic design, teaching, administrative functions, and so on. Most of these pay relatively little.
Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies, to making informed medical decisions.
It's not much more complicated than that.
I suggest you revisit your hypothesis with a little less bias.
To be blunt, it's much easier for the majority of the population to get an English degree or some other generic liberal arts degree and therefore be qualified for an entry level job in the publishing industry.
I'm sure someone somewhere is giving up a highly lucrative job to roll the dice on the next great American novel, but it's not a meaningful number.
Instead of using Palantir, working at the FSF, the Linux Foundation, etc. It's not that they don't make good money, it's that it's often a fraction of what could be made at a comparable for profit company.
I think the video game industry is an apt comparison. The pay is often not very good with the motivation being, for many people, prestige based, in some form or another. I suspect there are analogies in the game industry and publishing 50-100 years ago.
That perceived associated goodness is what caused the increase in qualified candidates in the first place?
That's hardly the only factor here. In the end it's really about the fact that we appear to have an infinite appetite for blowing people up. ($1.5 trillion, next year, a full 50% increase at a time when we're supposedly needing to cut back.)
But don't discount the thumb on the scale against jobs like these. It's a persistent problem in many industries -- so pervasive that it just looks natural.
Almost all of the fiction I read comes by personal recommendations. Including from social media like Hacker News. I haven't stood in a bookstore browsing shelves and reading blurbs in many years but I read more than ever.
A publisher provides marketing, editing and distribution. Literary marketing is becoming better in the peer-to-peer form than the old business-to-consumer form. Distribution has become unbundled via self-publishing. Editing is no less important than ever, but it would be so much better if the value from such an individual art can be captured by those talented individuals rather than by corporate.
Long live literature, but may Big Publishing fade away into obsolescence.
Elmore Leonard was very familiar with movie producers by that point in his career, and clearly saw a a funny similarly between what a mob does and how Hollywood operates.
At the same time, the book is almost a tender mark of appreciation towards the role a producer plays. It's one of the few stories that spotlights what a producer actually does and shows it's importance in greasing the wheels enough to actually make a movie.
A small group of agents hold most of the power, and the system has confused power for taste. This has also, in my experience, led to the outlets that hold the most power using that power to push agendas instead of seeking out the best literature. I do not believe this can persist indefinitely.
> ...the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good, something that serves humanity, while Palantir designs software that the government uses to find targets for drone strikes. Jobs at Random House are much harder to get than jobs at Palantir, even though jobs at Random House are paid much more poorly.
An interesting take, particularly the assertion that "jobs at Random House are much harder to get than jobs at Palantir." I'd be absolutely 100% shocked if that were true.
Generally, the more a job pays, the harder it is to get hired. These are generally correlated with job-obtaining-difficulty:
* high pay
* required certifications / licenses (law, medical, etc.)
* (low) supply of workers with desirable experience
Given the above, it seems that Palantir jobs would be much more difficult to obtain.
> I am giving a huge corporation a product to sell, but I am doing it for a fraction of what it cost me to produce that product.
well, relatively huge by the article's own admission.
on edit: changed but to by