How to Get Paid

Book publishing.

LIKE countless young writers before him, John Cusick moved to New York City, in 2007, to pursue his dream of literary stardom. Having worked for a university press in college, Cusick looked for a job in publishing, but the best he could find to start out was a part-time gig as a personal assistant and dog-walker for literary agent Scott Treimel.

“My first duties were right out of The Devil Wears Prada,” says Cusick. “I was the guy walking down the street with this huge dog on a leash and laundry over one arm and the phone to my ear.”

Playing Anne Hathaway to Treimel’s Meryl Streep didn’t pay especially well either. While living in a bedbug-infested apartment in Brooklyn, Cusick earned about $350 a week from various part-time jobs. “I had this great plan, which was that if I bought two hot dogs for lunch from the local vendor, that was four dollars for food that day,” he recalls.

But Cusick quickly graduated from walking Treimel’s dog and fetching his dry-cleaning to helping the agent with foreign rights and book contracts, and within a couple of years, Cusick had begun taking on clients of his own. Meanwhile Treimel helped Cusick launch his writing career, persuading him to switch from literary fiction to young adult fiction and selling his first novel, Girl Parts. It was published by Candlewick Press in 2010. Cusick has since written two more novels—his latest, Dimension Why, is due out from HarperCollins next year—and now works as an agent at Folio Literary Management.

Cusick’s rise from dog-walker living on frankfurters to published novelist and literary agent may sound like a Cinderella story, but in many ways it’s par for the course for writers working in book publishing, a field in which everyone must endure a low-paying apprenticeship period, usually in New York, one of the most expensive cities on the planet.

“If you really just want to be a writer, there are easier ways to support yourself while you’re trying to write your first novel,” says Caroline Zancan, a senior editor at Henry Holt and the author of the novel Local Girls (Riverhead, 2015). “There are jobs that are strictly nine-to-five where you don’t need to use your creative capital, and they probably pay better than publishing.”

Any writer considering a career in publishing must first face the fact that the job market is fiercely competitive— and it’s shrinking. Over the past two decades, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people working in book publishing has plummeted from just more than 91,000 in 1997 to roughly 60,000 at the end of 2018, with the most precipitous drop coming in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

Because jobs are scarce and the work is engaging and prestigious, publishing professionals are both highly qualified—nearly everyone has a college degree, and Ivy League diplomas are common—and often underpaid. This is particularly true in the early years of one’s career, when most would-be editors, agents, and book publicists pick up on-the-job training in a series of internships and assistant positions. According to Glassdoor, an online employment site, editorial assistants in New York City average about $39,000 a year, which sounds okay until you take into account the long hours assistants put in and the fact that the cost of living in the city is more than double the national average. Internships, which serve as gateways to assistant jobs, often pay nothing at all.

Newcomers may be able to bypass some of this apprentice period by enrolling in a publishing course, which typically offers classes on book and magazine publishing as well as job fairs for would-be applicants. But this, too, can be expensive. The prestigious sixweek Columbia Publishing Course, at Columbia University’s journalism school, for example, costs $8,575, including room and board.

Of course not all publishing jobs are in New York City. Many independent presses, like Tin House Books (Portland, Oregon), Coffee House Press and Graywolf Press (Minneapolis), Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, Washington), and McSweeney’s Books (San Francisco), are spread out across the United States, and a number of literary agents live and work outside New York City. But these tend to be smaller operations, and people interested in a career in publishing gravitate toward New York, where there are far more jobs and where it’s easier to jump between firms without having to move to a new city.

At literary agencies, where agents earn most of their money from commissions on their writers’ work, the math is even more complicated. Agents typically take 15 percent of their writers’ U.S. income and 20 percent of foreign earnings, but new agents landing their first clients may not have significant earnings to draw from for years. Agencies handle this in a variety of ways, the most common being the employment of so-called “baby agents” who handle subsidiary rights and other more administrative duties at the agency as they build their client list.

At Folio Literary, Cusick earns what

is called a “draw,” which amounts to a regular salary advanced to him against his future commissions. Now that his commissions have begun to outpace what the agency is paying him—and he has paid back the money the agency advanced him in his earlier years—he earns his regular salary plus whatever extra is owed to him in commissions.

“The thing about being an agent versus being an editor is that it’s very slow to build momentum, so that when you start off, you don’t make any money and you’re probably going to end up owing back taxes like I did,” Cusick says. “But as time goes on, as you build that momentum, the money starts to make itself a little bit. A book I sold a few years ago is now generating royalties, and twice a year there’s just a check that comes in. I didn’t do anything, and there it is.”

The combination of poorly paid apprenticeships and the high cost of living in cities where many publishers have their offices can make it hard for young people without savings or family support to join the industry, which is one factor that contributes to a stillglaring lack of diversity in publishing. In the book business, according to a 2018 study by Publishers Weekly, fully 86 percent of the workforce is white and only 2 percent is Black.

Nigerian-born poet and fiction writer Hafizah Geter’s path to her present job as an editor at Amazon Publishing’s Little A and Topple Books illustrates how hard it can be for a writer of modest means to gain a foothold in the book business. Geter moved to New York City in 2012 without a job and survived her first year by crashing at the apartment of a college friend in Brooklyn and relying on a small stipend from a Cave Canem fellowship. She then found work at a series of arts nonprofits, scraping by financially until the job at Amazon Publishing opened up in 2017.

“When I started working at Little A, my father, who is an artist and is

Any writer considering a career in publishing

must first face the fact that the job market

is fiercely competitive—and it’s shrinking.

Over the past two decades, the number

of people working in book publishing has

plummeted from just more than 91,000 in

1997 to roughly 60,000 at the end of 2018.

seventy-three now, was able to retire from teaching because he no longer had to help me pay my student loans,” she says. “It gave me the freedom to start my life and to afford being an adult who is not thinking, ‘What do I have to sell in order to get health insurance?’”

But even if they navigate the long apprenticeship period and beat the stiff competition for jobs, writers working in publishing still have to find time to write. Agents and editors spend most of their workday hammering out contracts or taking meetings and phone calls, leaving much of the labor of reading submissions and editing manuscripts to nights and weekends. The same goes for publicists, who are expected to work long hours designing publicity campaigns and drumming up interest in their authors’ work. Asked how many hours a week she typically worked, bestselling essayist Sloane Crosley, who held positions in publicity at Vintage Books and HarperCollins for ten years, laughs and says: “All of them?”

For Crosley, the author of three essay collections and a novel, The Clasp (FSG, 2015), maintaining a writing career while working in publishing meant writing before and after office hours and using vacations to go on book tour, and ultimately she left her job as assistant director of publicity at Vintage in 2012 to become a full-time writer. “People write novels and have day jobs all the time,” she says. “I just found it very difficult to do that.”

This is a common theme in conversations with writers who work in publishing. Some say they wake up early and write for an hour or two before work, and others talk of opening Google Docs on their laptops for a few harried minutes of revisions on the subway. Others, like Zancan, the Henry Holt editor, find they’re able to write in concentrated bursts as their workload ebbs and flows.

Early in her career, when Zancan was an editorial assistant at Knopf, the work was so all-consuming that she essentially put her writing on hold for three years. After she returned to fiction, Zancan earned a low-residency MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and wrote her debut novel in two years. A year after that book came out (and a week before she gave birth to her first child), she finished the first draft of her second novel, We Wish You Luck, due out from Riverhead in 2020.

“You can do it all, but not all at one time, if that makes sense,” she says.

Although Zancan and others in the industry caution against viewing a career in publishing as a shortcut to winning a book contract, the contacts and insider knowledge that come with working at a respected publishing house or literary agency can boost a literary career. After all, Cusick found his first agent by working for him, and today he is represented by Melissa Sarver White, a friend and colleague whose office is literally across the hall from his at Folio Literary.

Writers working in publishing have greater access to agents and editors, along with firsthand knowledge of how books are acquired and published. But these advantages will carry a writer only so far.

“I don’t think you can publish a book because you like a person,” Zancan says. “It’s such a commitment to publish a novel that I don’t think you can do it for any other reason than because you feel you can publish that novel well, regardless of who the author is.”

And, in some cases, literary success can create problems for people working in publishing. Crosley remembers calling newspaper editors to talk up one of her authors at Vintage only to be asked when she herself would be releasing her next book. “I know we can all hear the microscopic violin playing when I say that, but it is a problem,” she says. “It’s a small problem for me but potentially a big problem for the people I’m trying to advocate for. I loved those books. It didn’t change how hard I worked for them or how much I wanted them to succeed—but I can see how it’s not a great look.”

Then, too, some senior editors and agents resist hiring aspiring writers, fearing they will see publishing as a way to jump-start a writing career rather than as a career in its own right. Writers who look at jobs in publishing this way, according to those who have worked in the industry, are making a mistake. Building a career in publishing requires years of training, long hours of often underpaid labor, and a genuine interest in the business of publishing books.

“Obviously you learn a tremendous amount about the business,” Crosley says. “There are the authors you meet and the executives to whom you report. It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that I got nothing from my career in publishing. But I wouldn’t necessarily say, ‘Hey, go work at a really good publishing house for nine years on the off chance you might publish a zeitgeisty collection of essays.’ That doesn’t seem like a good financial plan.”

Some senior editors and agents resist hiring

aspiring writers, fearing they will see

publishing as a way to jump-start a writing

career rather than as a career in its own

right. Writers who look at jobs in publishing

this way, according to those who have worked

in the industry, are making a mistake.