Give me your tired, your poor editorial assistant

From an October 31, 1997 article by “Morgan Cast” for Salon:

The concept of a salary pie chart is rendered absurd by the disparities in salaries paid those who work different jobs in publishing. Imagine glam editor Gary Fisketjon’s wedge next to an editorial assistant’s stray-hair sliver: You’d need a microscope to find the latter’s portion. While editors with their own imprints command six-figure salaries, editorial assistants start in the $18,000 range. If they stick with it, they might be promoted — after five or so years — to an associate editor’s job, which pays a whopping $28,000 to $34,000. According to Publisher’s Weekly’s latest salary survey, the next job up the publishing ladder, editor, pays between $49,000 and $54,000, though I personally know editors who, after six years on the job, make barely more than $30,000.

Publishing salaries, at all levels, fluctuate greatly depending on the size of the company in question. According to PW, a senior editor at a small company can expect to make $51,483; at a mid-size house, $86,264; at a large house like Random House or Doubleday, $123,832. An editor at Putnam admitted the current salary structure is "frankly, just totally fucked up."

No kidding. Even if you take inflation into account, think much has changed since then? Think of some rising star in the industry who’s spent a few years toiling away in a publishing house. Then he or she disappears, for reasons like these:

The meager pay was once thought of as part of a genteel book training camp, in which bright young minds were groomed for better — and more remunerative — jobs. Judging from a recent New York Times article bemoaning the "brain drain" in the publishing industry, however, the system no longer makes much sense. "We lose about 25 percent of the people we hire," says the head of a small but distinguished publishing company, "A lot of the brightest kids find it easier to go into debt as a grad student — where they at least get low-interest loans — than to stay in this business and try to pay their rent."

The truth about publishing now is that the only sure way to get a raise is to leave your job. Getting yourself "hired away" is also probably the quickest route to promotion. "It’s sad," says a prominent New York editor, "the more you’ve settled into a job the better, but this isn’t an industry that rewards loyalty."

Let’s just say that a lot of the malaise that’s being aired out on various blogs suddenly came into clearer focus for me after reading this piece.

Which begs the question: who really benefits from a caste-like system such as this? And as consolidation has only become more widespread since then (Bertelsmann, HarperCollins swallowing William Morrow whole, etc.) who will keep on benefiting?

Exactly.