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My parents worked in publishing, friends do, and I have published a book - but I don't work in publishing. Why? Pay is super-low. Like, shockingly low. So low that many of the jr and even mid-level people have something else to support them (supportive partners, or quite often family money). Plus, there are only 5 big publishing houses: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin/Random House, and Simon & Schuster. Everybody ends up circulating among them, endlessly, and you can't *really* freelance the way you can in ad world.
Finally, and I might get killed for this, the politics can be annoying. Everyone wants to pretend they're saving the world, when really they are just publishing YA books about werewolves. These companies also made a big to-do about hiring more Black/brown editors around 2020, but then fired a bunch of them this year after giving them zero support. It's all gesture, no substance. At least in advertising we know what the score is, we don't have to pretend it's going to change society!
Hi
I'm professional book editor, typesetter and publisher.
I design book covers and help with self publishing
I worked in publishing as an art director for most of my career. Nice work, nice, smart people. The pay is very low. After our department was offshored I made my way to healthcare advertising. It’s harder than I thought it would be for a lot of reasons. But, I’m okay here as I’m towards the end of my career.
Yes!!!
I had this dream once, and as others say, the pay is extremely low. I’ve heard that it is traditionally a job for people with family money. Here’s some other insight. I had a middle grade novel published with Holt. It did very well, good reviews, sold to libraries and schools, etc. The most I made over the life of that book was $12,000., and that was considered good. The cover was a photo from Getty. So authors don’t make that much usually, and I would guess that the only authors getting original covers that art director would be proud to have designed are probably the most successful. I used to follow a book cover designer, who freelanced for publishing companies. Maybe you could look into that to test the waters.