With its April 20 issue, Publishers Weekly launched #BooksAreEssential, a campaign to “highlight the role books play in the health of American culture.” The prompt: take a picture of yourself reading, with the book partially covering your face. In its magazine pages and on Twitter, PW has been sharing the results—with top authors, editors, and agents participating. However, it has opened the door to an easy and scathing critique from those who don’t believe books ought to be deemed essential items and worth sacrificing a life.
Last week, an anonymous Twitter account launched, @PublishrsWeakly, taking direct aim at the campaign with tweets such as “i’m so glad we have all these books to help us breathe with our lungs” (here) and “#booksareessential because they’ll help us escape from the reality of what we expect from underpaid and uninsured workers in the midst of global crisis” (here).
Electric Literature ran a Q&A with the two people who created the account: a bookseller (now out of work) and a small-press employee, both of whom remain anonymous. They explain that their initial intent was to critique the PW campaign, but they’ve moved on to critique of the industry as a whole. People likely to be more sympathetic to @PublishrsWeakly: those who urgently call for a more diverse publishing industry, as well as those who argue for better wages and benefits (and unionizing) for booksellers, Amazon workers, and low-level publishing employees. @PublishrsWeakly now has an open call for book workers to organize.
The first weeks of 2020 were remarkable for the PR gains made by those pushing against the status quo in Big Five publishing, most notably when #DignidadLiteraria changed the conversation around Oprah pick American Dirt. But then coronavirus hit, pushing such concerns to the margins. @PublishrsWeakly could be an ingenious way for activists to gain control of the conversation again, but anonymous accounts can be problematic—and lead to dark places—as there’s no accountability for what’s said.
Elsewhere, two agents offered a reasoned critique of #BooksAreEssential, which Publishers Weekly published as a letter to the editor.
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.
