Five Things: October 17, 2024
This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox, with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email’s not your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed. I encourage you to click through the main links (there’s only five and they’re all interesting!), and if you enjoy something — send me (or them) an email, leave a comment, or hit the socials!
_ONE
XOXO | Erin Kissane
“Without the social internet, we’d never have been able to do it.”
I’ve been a fan of Kissane’s work ever since I first saw her speak at SXSW 2010, but I wasn’t expecting her XOXO Festival presentation to be such a surprisingly emotional must-watch. While it’s mainly about her important work with The COVID Tracking Project, it’s also a bracing reminder of how critical the social internet can be (particularly in 2020), and how much we’ve lost to capitalism’s purposeful poisoning of it.
We deserve better, but we have to be willing to fix it ourselves.
PS: I’d never heard of the XOXO Festival before last week, which apparently launched in 2012, the year after I left DBW, but I’m working my way through some of the other presentations, and highly recommend watching journalist Ed Yong right after Kissane, for a 1-2 gut punch of rage-inducing inspiration.
PPS: I’m also keeping an eye on Kissane’s latest project, and you should, too.
__TWO
The Marketing Career Path Is Crumbling. What Comes Next? | Robert Rose
Content and marketing professionals have lost their identity inside companies. Typically, there is no obvious next career move. Therefore, they must prioritize avenues that lead to a better (if still siloed) marketing job.
I’ve spent the vast majority of my marketing career in (and adjacent to) publishing, and the only time I was in a marketing department with more than five people was around the turn of the century, which lasted about a year before mass layoffs led to consolidation, and I survived primarily because of my lower salary. It’s what some people might call the end of the good old days.
My “career path” has frequently included the same fork in the road after a year or two: transition to a sales role (which I did twice internally, once externally), or find another job elsewhere (which I did several times).
On the bright side, mostly being on small teams meant marketing silos have been a rarity (typically an adjacent group controlled by a lifer who’d temporarily avoided consolidation), so I learned to do a little bit of everything — and every digital disruption was a familiar opportunity rather than an unknown threat. Being in publishing also meant “content marketing” and “owned media” have always been no-brainer concepts to me.
I honestly have no idea how younger marketers who’ve only known siloed roles can compete when consolidation and layoffs inevitably hit, which is probably why so many join agencies, go solo, or move out of marketing altogether. It must be even tougher for the many journalists who moved into content marketing roles over the past decade and are now finding their expertise being devalued by people buying and selling “AGI” snake oil.
___THREE
Oh Captain, My Captain! breaks down the door to traditional publishing | Rowan Zeoli
Their hesitancy stems from The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book, D’Amato’s initial attempt to bring proper RPGs into the fold at Adams Media. According to D’Amato, the anthology of 40+ microgames only sold 12,000 copies. Note the only in that sentence. By TTRPG industry standards, that would be an overwhelming success. By the standards of traditional publishing? A complete and utter failure.
Adams Media was a sister community during my first go-round at F+W Media, and its leader, Karen Cooper, was one of the more innovative thinkers at the company. They were the cool trade kids amidst a bunch of niche enthusiast brands, and it wasn’t terribly surprising they were an acquisition target for Simon & Schuster back in 2016 (a year before my ill-fated second round).
I’m not surprised to see them still dabbling in non-traditional spaces like TTRPGs, but the sales figures are what stood out for me in this article. The line between success and disappointment in publishing is more often about the amount of overhead buried in the P&L than actual units sold, and it’s one of the reasons I’ve always cautioned authors about chasing Big 5 dreams.
It’s similar in comics — at least back when we had somewhat reliable sales data from the direct market — where even second-tier periodicals (and their eventual collected editions) frequently outsold the vast majority of “prestige” literary publishing, but they’ll never get anywhere near the same amount of press coverage or industry respect.
____FOUR
Why Teens Across the Country Are Acquiring Brooklyn Public Library’s Free Digital Cards | Kelly Jensen
The top five themes in banned books as reported by the teens? LGBTQ+ characters or themes, Racial & social justice and other political topics, BIPOC characters or themes, Diverse or representative materials, and Overly broad / subjective category (“inappropriate”). All of those answers further explain the teens’ responses about wanting a BPL eCard because it would provide them a more diverse, inclusive collection than is available to them.
I’ve been skeptical about a lot of the “banned books” initiatives that have launched over the past couple of years, most of which are just thinly veiled marketing stunts — although sometimes there’s no veil at all.
I wasn’t really sure what to think about BPL giving library cards to teens living outside of New York as part of their Books Unbanned initiative, but unlike some other programs, they’re not limiting access to an arbitrary subset of “challenged” ebooks. Jensen breaks down some of the interesting data from the program, but the real reading is at the end, with notes from teens themselves explaining why they’re looking to Brooklyn to access ebooks they should theoretically have access to via their own local libraries.
Sadly, the barriers to access aren’t always just their parents or local politicians…
_____FIVE
Library Futures Welcomes First Advisory Board | Laura Crossett
The Library Futures Advisory Board consists of nine members who were selected for their expertise and leadership in their respective fields and are tasked with providing non-binding but critical strategic advice, valuable insights, and diverse perspectives to inform Library Futures’ organizational direction, priorities, and operations.
When I first bumped into Jennie Rose Halperin on Twitter a few years ago, I was very intrigued by what she was doing with Library Futures and its ambitious mission, which I once described as the Panorama Project on steroids. Fast forward to today and Panorama has been dormant for two years, its biggest cross-industry research initiative morphed into a narrower ALA project, and questions about libraries’ real impact on discovery and sales remain unanswered — while restrictive ebook licenses continue to drain their materials budgets.
Meanwhile, I’ve been impressed by how Library Futures is methodically carving out a place for itself at the very difficult intersection of publishers, libraries, ebooks, and copyright law. I’m genuinely honored to have joined their Advisory Board to lend whatever support and insights I can bring to the table, and I hope they’re able to build upon previous efforts that fell short.
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I need to do an episode of the podcast about Library Futures!
Absolutely! Jennie’s a good talker, I think she’d be a great guest.