The most-disliked people in the publishing industry • Hacker News Board

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#21

Post by tptacek » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #18

tptacek wrote: post #15

Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good No? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds t…

Some of it has to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. A lot of those jobs involve holding people's hands, "emotional labor", like nursing and teaching. These jobs are seen as something people (women, mostly) should do because they like being carers, rather than for the money. These jobs end up being paid less than they are really worth, especially since they often involve many hours without compensatio…

Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields with lots of job security and relatively straightforward entrance requirements. It's also true that both fields are valorized, but plumbing isn't and has the same dynamics. These arguments are all overdetermined.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#22

Post by abetusk » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #15

Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good No? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds t…

The specific analogy doesn't hold but the sentiment does.

Instead of using Palantir, working at the FSF, the Linux Foundation, etc. It's not that they don't make good money, it's that it's often a fraction of what could be made at a comparable for profit company.

I think the video game industry is an apt comparison. The pay is often not very good with the motivation being, for many people, prestige based, in some form or another. I suspect there are analogies in the game industry and publishing 50-100 years ago.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#23

Post by jeremymcanally » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 4:18 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #19

delichon wrote: post #11

I hope The Martian becomes the template of a new publishing world. Andy Weir couldn't get any publisher's attention until he self published and achieved 35,000 sales in three months without their help. He succeeded by word of mouth and not publisher's marketing. Almost all of the fiction I read comes by personal recommendations. Including from social media like Hacker News. I haven't stood in a bookstore browsing she…

The Martian was published in 2011. There are vanishingly few like it since then. Sometimes a book gets picked up purely on its merits. (It helps to appeal to a wealthy target audience.) But on average you'd get richer by getting a minimum wage job and spending it all on lottery tickets.

That's because publishers these days basically require you to have that magnitude of social media presence or they generally won't touch you. If they do, they will do next to nothing to help actually sell your book after it's printed. Very rarely will you see someone who hasn't built a platform already be given any sort of extra marketing or distribution for their work. You'll effectively give them 90% of the sale price for printing and possibly some limited distribution. Publishers used to be tastemakers and make picks and bets based on book merit, but now it's basically like they're just looking for things that would already succeed on their own and injecting themselves into the process.

They've basically figured out how to take half of their job and shove it off on the author while they still take their oversized cut. It's pretty egregious in my opinion.

I've seen this with all types of publishers, btw, from children's books to technical books. Heck, most technical publishers these days are mostly print on demand, so you're barely getting any unique product from the publisher at all.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#24

Post by claw-el » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 4:21 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #15

Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good No? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds t…

Wouldn’t the supply of labor for a role or company increase if what the company do, books or video games, is associated to what most people see as good, therefore, they are more willing to build their long term skill sets in?

That perceived associated goodness is what caused the increase in qualified candidates in the first place?

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#25

Post by beedeebeedee » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #21

jfengel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of it has to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. A lot of those jobs involve holding people's hands, "emotional labor", like nursing and teaching. These jobs are seen as something people (women, mostly) should do because they like being carers, rather than for the money. These jobs end up being paid less than they are really worth, especially since they often involve many hours without compensatio…

Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields with lots of job security and relatively straightforward entrance requirements. It's also true that both fields are valorized, but plumbing isn't and has the same dynamics. These arguments are all overdetermined.

That may be true elsewhere, but not in the US

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#26

Post by tptacek » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

beedeebeedee wrote: post #25

tptacek wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields with lots of job security and relatively straightforward entrance requirements. It's also true that both fields are valorized, but plumbing isn't and has the same dynamics. These arguments are all overdetermined.

That may be true elsewhere, but not in the US

Could you be more specific? I don't know what you're referring to.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#27

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #14

christkv wrote: post #3

Most books are loss leaders for publishing houses very few are profitable and even fewer are massively profitable. They keep publishing books that barely anybody reads because they have to have a diverse catalog.

>because they have to have a diverse catalog. Why must they have a diverse catalog?

there are two reasons, one has already been noted elsewhere - that you don't know what will succeed so you cast your net wide and hope you got one of the few winners in your catch.

The second reason is that your diverse catalog exists also as advertising for that subset of readers who will become your next authors, they might be dreaming for years about the day they can be published by Random House, just like their hero, obscure writer X from some years ago who did not earn out, but ended up inspiring the next generation's big thing.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#28

Post by ggreer » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #19

delichon wrote: post #11

I hope The Martian becomes the template of a new publishing world. Andy Weir couldn't get any publisher's attention until he self published and achieved 35,000 sales in three months without their help. He succeeded by word of mouth and not publisher's marketing. Almost all of the fiction I read comes by personal recommendations. Including from social media like Hacker News. I haven't stood in a bookstore browsing she…

The Martian was published in 2011. There are vanishingly few like it since then. Sometimes a book gets picked up purely on its merits. (It helps to appeal to a wealthy target audience.) But on average you'd get richer by getting a minimum wage job and spending it all on lottery tickets.

The Martian is an outlier in its success, but it's far from the only instance of successful self-published sci-fi. Recent examples I've read include The Powers of Earth[1] by Travis Corcoran and Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. In both cases, the authors quit their day jobs (I think both worked in software) and are now full time writers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Powers_of_the_Earth

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#29

Post by mold_aid » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:31 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #26

beedeebeedee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true elsewhere, but not in the US

Could you be more specific? I don't know what you're referring to.

Almost certain OP is referring to the fact that nurses and teachers are not well-paid or respected in the US, which I'd like to note as well. Despite this, Public Health as a pseudo-STEM major nearly ranks with STEM fields in general for majors seen as "workplace-ready."

Maybe there are too many English majors (I honestly think the supply of careers is too low). But I think the "supply is greater than the demand" is possibly now more an explanatory argument for unemployment rates for Engineering and PT and other such quiescent majors. Certainly there are plenty of Ed majors for a field whose workers fled at pace earlier this decade.

Let's assume I'm teaching 25 or so Engl majors right now in a class with publishing as its central focus (hypothetically) at a state school. The students would neither be able to define "small press" nor name the big 5 - even the ones who just came back from AWP. The linked piece, I think, correctly names the romanticized vision of publishing that is divorced from understandings of the cost of living in NYC. I don't also think that college majors are actually all that itchy to get into editorial, whether or not they're all and every single one applying for the same pool of jobs.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#30

Post by djoldman » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:32 PM UTC

> ...the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good, something that serves humanity, while Palantir designs software that the government uses to find targets for drone strikes. Jobs at Random House are much harder to get than jobs at Palantir, even though jobs at Random House are paid much more poorly.

An interesting take, particularly the assertion that "jobs at Random House are much harder to get than jobs at Palantir." I'd be absolutely 100% shocked if that were true.

Generally, the more a job pays, the harder it is to get hired. These are generally correlated with job-obtaining-difficulty:

* high pay

* required certifications / licenses (law, medical, etc.)

* (low) supply of workers with desirable experience

Given the above, it seems that Palantir jobs would be much more difficult to obtain.