If we’re not living in the proverbial desperate times, we’re certainly living in politically charged ones. Organizations that work with and for authors are speaking up.
A recent example came on Black Friday in a mailing from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). Headlined “Tax Bills Threaten to Impose New Financial Burdens on Students & Academies,” the message (which you can read here) outlines what AWP has identified as problem issues (with more details on each point in the mailing):
- elimination of the tax deduction for student loans
- new taxes on tuition waivers
- new taxes on university endowments
AWP gives a direct call to action: “Please contact your elected officials in Congress now. Tax reform bills in the House and in the Senate have provisions that would impair the accessibility of higher education for the poor and the middle class.”
Two days prior to the AWP mailing, the Authors Guild raised the alarm on the FCC’s proposed assault on net neutrality. The Guild’s new article refers to a letter it sent in March to the FCC’s chairman, Ajit Pai, demanding preservation of net neutrality against large ISP efforts to control connection speeds, access to content, and more. Other media reports, such as Brian Fung’s work at the Washington Post on the Pai proposal, raise the concern that changes by the FCC could open the door to much more consolidation of broadcast control.
On the world stage, more alarm bells are sounding. Last week, International Publishers Association president Michiel Kolman was in Brussels speaking to a European Parliament audience about the role of scholarly publishing and its authors in a time of fake news, which is often distributed by tech giants such as Facebook and Google. With an overarching theme of artificial intelligence versus publishing protocol, Kolman, an executive with the Netherlands’ Elsevier, said that traditional scholarly content “has been edited, peer-reviewed, and validated. … Most importantly, it is carefully curated so that it remains accessible—and citable—in the future. In other words, we take responsibility for the content we produce.”
Bottom line: Rising political distress is generating new pressure on service organizations and advocacy groups to step into the political arena. While there’s been a good deal of debate and discussion among industry players about the extent to which publishers, publishing-industry organizations, and authors should take sides, we think it’s correct for organizations charged with looking out for authors’ welfare to speak up when they see threats or opportunities. The times, they are a-changing—hourly. Expect the next bulletin of this kind as quickly as you can spell Pocahontas.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
