Resisting Book Industry Gatekeeping

I suspect that most of the people who regularly watch this channel, read our blog, listen to our podcast, are very committed to the ideas of equity and justice.

That's at least what I typically see from folks that come to me after having watched this channel.

But this does get to be a little bit hairy when we think about resistance to some of the inequitable structures of the traditional book industry.

Because the other thing that tends to be true about the authors I work with is that they have very high standards, they want a very high quality book, and that very often means that they have their eye on a big book deal.

Now what this means is that they are now in this position both to need the support, need the approval of the traditional publishing gatekeepers, while also trying to hold on to these deeply felt genuine beliefs that equity and justice are important while knowing that traditional publishers are not known as the most equitable, just types of companies.

So how do we reconcile this idea, this kind of love hate that we have both The idea that it would feel so good to be able to have entry into the traditional book industry via a book contract, but that we also know that we don't personally support a lot of the policies, a lot of the ways that these companies approach the world.

How do we balance these two ideas? Well, as a former social movement historian, as well as someone who is the owner of a hybrid press and an author services company that helps people get these big book deals, I'm in an interesting position here because I both can see that there is always a history of social movements, that there is always nuance, that there are always push-pull, there's always some level of uncertainty of how we want to approach our resistance.

And I also can see how deeply felt the belief in the traditional excellence is when it comes specifically to the book industry.

And that's why today I want to spend some time breaking down how we can really think about resistance to some of these structures that we find really unjust in the traditional book industry, while also not abandoning our desire to technically be part of that industry by publishing our own excellent book.

Now I want to be really clear here.

I have no ulterior motives here in terms of getting you to not go for a traditional deal or getting you to self-publish or choose a hybrid.

No ulterior motives.

The only thing that I want to do here.

is give you some frameworks so that you can think about where you want to place yourself in this idea of resistance.

Because I think it is really important that we can feel really good about moving forward the way that we want to.

And because I often find that when we think about where we want to fall in resistance, it actually frees us up to make decisions that are truer to ourselves about where we're going to place our own book and how we're going to support other authors' books.

There is lots of room, tons of gray area here, and that's what I want to get into today.