On Not Working in the Publishing Industry

I drafted this post in July 2025 after reading this essay by Maris Kreizman

Well, Kreizman's essay has completely cured any of my lingering desires/wishes/regrets to have made it into the publishing industry.

During my sophomore year of high school, my mom introduced to me the concept of (book) editing as a career; around that time, she had gotten connected with an online, christian writing/editing group and was doing some freelance (emphasis on free) copyediting/light content editing for an author seeking publication. I loved books and writing (still do) but could never finish writing any of my own stories (still true). We were at a local park for my sibling’s cross country meet, milling around near a part of the course all the middle schoolers would soon come thundering down. It was sunny and warm, and I imagine red-winged blackbirds sang in the swampy, rustling reeds around us.

The type of work my mom described—helping people improve their writing and stories, making sure that the final product is polished and the best it can possibly be—sounded like an absolute dream. I’m sure my entire face lit up as we talked about what that would be like to read all day, surrounded by books, wielding words, discussing about plots and characters and themes with other writers.

A man from our church stood nearby, and he scoffed at whatever excited, fumbling words I was saying. In his eyes, I was being too haughty and vain, too self-assured in my own writing skills to think I could apply them to the stories of others. The arrogance of youth.

Despite the instant naysayer, I later took undergraduate courses on editing and writing and publishing, many of which were taught by an actually haughty and arrogant asshole. I first met said asshole on a campus tour as a prospective student, sitting in on an intro class that started with him reprimanding a student for wearing a green hat (it was unprofessional, maybe, or distracting, or something else archaic and bullshit and slightly misogynistic). After class, he handed me a book he wrote about how to be a godly man—thanks, I guess, for seeing the trans twink in me before I ever did (there would be one other time at That School that someone called my transness out before I even knew what “transgender” meant). His class—the expertise he demonstrated, the passion for getting his students published, his dedication to Jesus—was a major factor in my selection of That School as the one I would attend for undergrad.

But once classes started, from almost the beginning, I developed a distaste for this professor. He was so full of himself, so assured, and so rigid and old-fashioned in the writing and grammar sense (I gleefully flaunt split infinitives, which he loathed, because I have a better grasp of the fluidity and beauty of language than he ever did), as well as in how he treated other people, particularly women. It wasn’t until my junior year that he started repeating whole lectures, when I would flip back in my notebook to two weeks ago and see the exact same words already written out. Expectations got increasingly erratic, and we all thought it was because of grief from his wife dying from lupus or lymphoma or some other L-word disease. Meanwhile, bubbling under the surface—which broke shortly after that school year ended—was allegation after allegation of sexual harassment. A former student publicly raised the alarm, and after that, women from conferences spanning decades also raised their voices against him.

He of course claimed it was all bogus, people jumping onto the #MeToo bandwagon and looking for clout. But those of us who had overheard him make odd little comments over the years, like saying a student’s dress looked like a nightgown, knew it was more than empty accusations. (Yes, it was an evangelical university, and yes, the university had heard the student’s complaint a decade prior but had done nothing, and yes, after the accusations surfaced, he suddenly retired with no lasting consequences.)

But that’s him, a monster I haven't seen for years and will never see again.

There was one other professor in that department, one who had actual and current editing experience and knew what she was talking about without being obnoxious and lording it over everyone. I learned a lot about editing and the publishing process under her, particularly from a semester-long project that broke us into groups and simulated the publishing process using completed manuscripts written by our peers. (The book my group worked on was incredibly gay-coded, like almost erotic, but my closeted little asexual ass barely registered that—looking back, I remain uncertain about whether or not those undercurrents were intentional.)

There was still always something off in that department, tho, beyond the way its two offices and one classroom were shoved into the old science building, which reeked of formaldehyde and had barely functioning AC. The influence of the predatory professor, who had founded the department, leaked into the brag board in the hallway, which felt so brash and unchristian even to my brainwashed mind. It felt superficial, the churning-out of article after article instead of studying and working on the craft of writing.

Graduating, tho, was a different matter. Job application after job application went unanswered by the countless publishers and imprints I submitted my materials to. I completed as many as I could, carefully tailoring each cover letter as I had been taught. When the program’s chronic over-achiever, who seemed constantly on the verge of burnout, shared that she had submitted well over 100 applications in X period of time, I felt so defeated. I limped on, applying less and less frequently. Somehow I got an internship with a Mormon (gasp!) indie publisher that produced some of the worst writing I've encountered; that only lasted a few months before, gratefully, the internship ended. And then I thought I had experienced a breakthrough when I snagged a freelance proofreading job with a large evangelical publisher, but all that resulted in was a year of correcting errors on books about parenting and spiritual warfare.

And then I lost my faith, unrelated to the handful of proofreading books or the monotony of job applications. At some point along the line, I also lost the editing bug. Don’t get me wrong, I still love to analyze art, to correct the hyphens into en-dashes where appropriate, to pick something apart to rebuild it stronger (What could we change here to strengthen the whole thing? Why did the author or director make that choice? I love how this element is used here). But faith, gender, and sexuality crises burst in and consumed my mind. Reality also set in, along with a deep sense of betrayal at the concept of “delayed gratification”—I had worked so hard to get a degree from a quality school and then to apply for jobs I felt I was qualified for, and I had spent my entire life serving a god who I suddenly viewed as manipulative and cruel. I no longer needed an editing job, I needed a job where I didn’t have to pretend to be a good christian.

So I switched jobs, switched jobs, switched jobs again. Pondered a return to school, first for biology, then settled on that Master’s degree everyone had encouraged me to pursue a few years earlier. I finished my first semester of grad school and felt content to pitch in on small editing projects at work, where I could get a nibble of the rush I used to get, the zone I used to slip into when I was connecting ideas, asking questions, prompting shifts in sentence structure and word selection. I still missed the zone sometimes, and felt grateful for the opportunities to encounter it, even if just for a moment.

And I forgot those dreams of becoming an editor, working on books that weren’t merely the next bestseller, but books that said things, did things, had meaning and weight and import—even if to a handful of readers—and that were good, well-written and artful and the way I had known some books, sometimes, to be since I was a kid.

All of that until I read this LitHub article. I once wanted to work in publishing, and I once thought that my skill alone could get me there, and not the networking everyone at college talked about but that I remained unsure how to do. This sounded like an interesting article; unionized and striking workers in the publishing industry? Sign me up.

But when is reality ever as close to the dream we have? When job hunting right after college, I knew the entry-level publishing jobs all paid pennies, especially for being based in NYC (this was pre-covid, so remote jobs were sparse). I still held out hope, tho, and thought I just needed to get my foot in the door, that maybe I could make connections through that freelance proofreading or clunky internship. But it turns out, based on this article, that in reality, I most likely would have gotten severe burnout or depression or anxiety (even worse than what I actually experienced) and then had to quit and move back home. And even if I hadn’t, I would slowly hate myself for working on useless, trashy books that I didn’t agree with or that were written without the slightest sense of care or whose rhetoric was directly harming vulnerable communities I came to love and be part of.

And it also turns out that haughty snobs and predators like my former professor find a lot of power and prestige in the publishing industry; rather than a one-off fluke, he was an indication of what myself and my peers would daily have to deal with had we all gone on to live out our publishing dreams.

In the end, maybe it's for the best that a lot of us ended up in entirely different industries and careers after undergrad. I know I feel grateful to be where I am now; it's not the life I had wanted, but I think it's significantly better than the life I imagined for myself.