Thursday
Dec042008
Doom?
Thursday, December 4, 2008 
It's one thing when every investment bank in the nation goes under or has to be bailed out, or when the auto industry is on the verge of collapse. It's a whole different kettle of proverbial fish though when the publishing world starts looking like Armageddon.
Yesterday, the staff at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was decimated. Executive Editor extraordinaire Ann Patty (who workshopped a story of mine at Squaw two years ago) was axed along with legions of others, apparently including 200 at Harcourt Orlando, 75 at the Riverside Publishing Branch, and more on the way.
Seem like a good time to start shopping a short story collection by a first-time author? Hmmm....
Reader Comments (3)
I was living in New York City on 9/11/01, and after that, it looked like no one would ever read fiction again. It's hard to remember the feeling, but world events were so paramount and frightening and changeable that to dive into an invented world seemed silly or dangerous . . . At any rate, lists shrunk and a scare went up, but eventually, things returned, if not to normal, to some level of commerce that did not equal the end of books. In a depression, people may not have money, but without jobs, they do have time. And books are the best anti-depressant there is, if not economically, at least personally. Soldier on, first time authors and the rest of us, too. I, for one, could not live without books . . . and I buy them, too.
When the news first hit, I googled the story and found similar stories of mass layoffs and corporate restructuring going back decades. It's a downer, but it's not a new phenomenon. It'll happen again, I'm sure. Still, it's a sad to see it first hand.
Interesting (and heartening) about the post-9/11 uptick and about the historically cyclical nature of the business, though sad to see so many good people losing their jobs at the moment.
Elizabeth, on books being "the best anti-depressant there is", I take it you have not been curling up recently with Sylvia Plath or Lord of the Flies or Hamlet or Death of a Salesman or... ;) Probably wise just now.