During the first quarter of the year, Simon & Schuster saw earnings nearly double due to strong backlist sales, BookTok, and low returns. With such stellar results, S&S employees are wondering what the company is doing to address staff burnout, overwork, and compensation. In a memo to employees, CEO Jonathan Karp encouraged staff to take their vacation time and not monitor their email at all hours unless a supervisor says it’s urgent.
We can say from experience that when staff don’t take vacation time, it’s usually because they don’t want to experience the extreme suffering of returning from vacation, as it can take weeks or months to get back on track. In other words: Telling people to go ahead and take their vacation shows a serious lack of understanding of where the problem lies.
Regarding staffing levels, Karp told Publishers Lunch (subscription required), “We have strategically looked at adding staff in a careful, disciplined way. We do have to watch our overhead, but we’re very aware that we’re in a period of growth and of real change. The social media we thought was going to sell books 15 years ago now is really going to sell books. To create those social media assets and market these books effectively does require more people.”
Karp’s memo also addressed compensation with the usual corporate-speak about making “market-driven adjustments” and examining “benchmarks throughout the industry.”
At the Pikes Peak Writers Conference in late April, an agent panel discussed the problems of editorial burnout and short staffing and how these problems affect them and their clients. Lucienne Diver of The Knight Agency said, “Publishers are not reinvesting in their biggest resource, which is their staff, their editors, their publicists. … Publishing is way more than a full-time job. People work evenings, they work weekends, and publishing salaries are not high. People are not making a lot of money, they’re not getting promoted fast enough, and people have been leaving the industry. People are seeing books getting million-dollar deals … yet they don’t have the money to raise someone to a full editor or pay them a little more or hire assistants.”
Hannah Andrade at the Bradford Literary Agency concurred. “When the staff leaves, they aren’t replacing that person. Instead they’re combining lists,” she said. That means fewer editors to submit to, and editors have a lot more work because they inherit the list of those who left. And that leads to longer wait times when hearing back on submission rounds as well as longer edit times for contracted manuscripts. “Publishing doesn’t put their money where their mouth is,” Andrade said. “It’s very unsustainable to be in this industry. … Editors don’t have time to take on something they have to work with,” leading them to prefer and contract projects that are pristine.
For an up-close and lengthy discussion of this problem (with lots of drinking involved), read Paul Bogaards’s honest and frank newsletter.
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.
