{"id":30905,"date":"2019-09-17T08:29:16","date_gmt":"2019-09-17T12:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=30905"},"modified":"2019-09-17T08:29:16","modified_gmt":"2019-09-17T12:29:16","slug":"it-takes-guts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=30905","title":{"rendered":"It Takes Guts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Happy <em>Guts<\/em> Day, everybody!<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.indiebound.org\/book\/9780545852500\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-30906\" src=\"http:\/\/wordpress.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/guts-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"188\" height=\"272\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nIn honor of the release of <a href=\"https:\/\/goraina.com\/\">Raina Telgemeier&#8217;<\/a>s new honest and endearing graphic memoir about gastric distress, anxiety, and therapy,\u00a0I wanted to celebrate the many kinds of courage it takes to bring books into the world and into the hands of readers\u2014all of which involve gastric distress, anxiety, and, ideally, therapy.<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Authors and Illustrators<\/strong> \u2014 Nothing happens without these brave souls, introverts for the most part, who bare their creative souls, write and avoid writing, draw and avoid drawing, revise and despair, reward themselves with questionable snacks, anticipate launch day with a strange mix of excitement and dread, steel themselves for public events, take on social media with varying degrees of trepidation and success, and no sooner have completed one project than have to start at the base of the next Everest. Kudos to you-dos, creators of courage!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Editors<\/strong> \u2014They&#8217;re\u00a0regarded as red-pen-wielding tyrants\u00a0and\u00a0also as saviors by authors, sometimes both on the same day by the same author.\u00a0Their work is invisible when most successful, and when their &#8216;absence&#8217; is noticed (i.e., a book\u00a0is criticized for needing\u00a0a heavier editorial hand)\u2014usually due to circumstances outside their control\u2014they have no public way to defend themselves. Their roles have broadened far beyond the nurturing of authors and language and literature to include impossible workloads. A toast to editors!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Art Directors and Jacket Illustrators<\/strong> \u2014 So many projects to shepherd, so little time! Skewered if their work is too similar to others in the market, lambasted internally if a unique cover treatment fails to telegraph its genre and intended audience in a single glance. Gone are the days (were they ever thus?) when there\u00a0was time to read\u00a0a novel cover to cover\u00a0and get to know the characters and story before sketching out the perfect encapsulation of the mood and themes of a book. The fact that this happens at all, and so beautifully when it does, is a testament to hard work and creativity. A goblet of mead to the art department!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Sales and Marketing Department\u00a0<\/strong>\u2014 These folks are responsible for\u00a0a book&#8217;s public\u00a0face. They design promotional approaches\u00a0and must present\u00a0each season&#8217;s darlings (and occasional duds) to\u00a0all of the field and telephone sales reps\u00a0who will take the new titles out to bookstore, school, library, and special accounts for pre-orders. Ahh, when a book promo campaign works, they are on top of the world! When it doesn&#8217;t, when a strong push and expensive mailings and high hopes fail to bring the readership a book deserves, then comes the need for Pepto-Bismol. Comfort and courage to the sales and marketing department!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Sales Reps<\/strong> \u2014 The patient and good-humored people who lug tote after tote, wheelie bag after wheelie bag into their cars or\u00a0send box after box of book samples to their accounts, hoping to entice them to make larger orders in an ever-shrinking retail world. This involves sitting for hours with booksellers of variable preparedness, some of whom enter a meeting with spreadsheets, others of whom haven&#8217;t had a chance to look at the catalog. These intrepid souls are expected to endure title-by-title discussion of their house&#8217;s 200\u20131,200 titles of the season, manage in-house pressure to sell more books and bookstore pressure\u00a0to dish the real scoop on a book&#8217;s quality.\u00a0They\u00a0listen to complaints, wish lists, and lengthy anecdotes. They are expected to\u00a0admire\u00a0cute dog and cat photos. And then they have to do\u00a0the exact same thing again, 100 more times till all the accounts have been seen. Scream therapy and a massage for the sales reps!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Publicists <\/strong>\u2014These\u00a0people are almost always young, because you need endless amounts of energy to manage the multi-city author tours, strange requests, last-minute cancellations and travel delays, urgent phone calls, unpredictable author needs, and Burj Khalifa-high expectations (that&#8217;s the tallest building in the world, in Dubai, and yes, I did have to look it up). They are also the people who create and then have to wade through endless pages of event grids filled with bookstore requests from all over the country. They are the liaison between the publisher and bookstore or library, they protect authors with leonine ferocity (but always gently and professionally), and they\u00a0absorb the\u00a0disappointments when an event falters.\u00a0It&#8217;s a detail-laden Hades, is publicity. Soft pillows, chocolate, and a cell-free\u00a0two-week island vacation\u00a0for publicists!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Publishers<\/strong> \u2014 Let&#8217;s not forget the people who take on the Goliath of this economic sinkhole we call the\u00a0book industry, the ones who strive to uphold free speech,\u00a0bounce between the Scylla of monopolistic\u00a0threat\u00a0from their largest vendor and the Charybdis of that threat&#8217;s wide reach, and have to\u00a0find a way to make the company&#8217;s bottom line hover above the red. For the most part, these are people who\u00a0entered\u00a0the field filled with\u00a0the greatest love and respect\u00a0for books and ideas, and have found themselves in an ever-changing landscape. To those fierce defenders of the best publishing can be, a stiff slug of whiskey or tonic and courage to you!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Librarians<\/strong> \u2014\u00a0What book lover doesn&#8217;t have a childhood librarian who took notice of their wild love of reading and recommended formative, touchstone novels and nonfiction titles at key moments? Or if they didn&#8217;t, they deserved one. Despite the worthy but time-consuming pressures of turning libraries into media centers and community event spaces, librarians still manage to cultivate a love of books in the most democratic, inclusive, possibility-filled public spaces on the planet. I always tell children in the bookstore that libraries are magical \u2014 a place where you can read endless numbers of books for free! Libraries contain worlds, available to all. Extra love, extra reading glasses, and extra time to librarians!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Teachers<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 You can&#8217;t know a teacher without hearing horror stories of understaffing, the pullback of services for children with all kinds of special needs, the useless standardized testing nonsense, and the ridiculous demands on their time and sanity. And yet, despite these pressures, teachers manage to share the love of books with their students, reading aloud during lunch time and class time, introducing their students to the deeply beautiful, funny, moving, lively, marvelous works of imagination and substance that create lifelong readers. For teachers: dance parties, anxiety meds, and\u00a0an end to the\u00a0snide, ignorant &#8220;you get so much vacation&#8221; comments from outsiders!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Booksellers<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 While it\u00a0might\u00a0be unseemly to extol the virtues of my own tribe, I will do so (albeit briefly), because I&#8217;ve never known such a team of dedicated, passionate people, who\u2014despite terrible pay, ridiculous retail challenges, and unbelievable numbers of tiny fires to put out on a daily basis (a few of which you can read about <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=ffvumoye&amp;paged=123\">here<\/a>)\u2014persevere in the service of\u00a0literature and information and social justice, and share a belief in the importance of bookstores as gathering places for community members, conversation, and an exchange of ideas. (We are definitely not in it for the money. It&#8217;s a terrible business, but a fantastic job.)\u00a0My fellow booksellers are a rushed, hardworking, funny, smart, resourceful group of people I am so grateful to call my colleagues. To you, my\u00a0pals and peers, I wish the kind of gastric relief, lift of anxiety, and business therapy that comes from bountiful sales of great books like <em>Guts<\/em>!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">(Plus an extra secret 24-hour day in every week so we can pretend to have a work-life balance.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The book business is not for the faint of heart\u2014or stomach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}