The Longer I Work in Publishing, the More I'm Convinced It's Sorcery, Psychology, and Guesswork

4 ways working with books has changed how I read and interact with them

Working in publishing has fundamentally changed the way I experience books.

I don’t say this in the dramatic, “I can no longer read for fun” sense; I still read constantly. If anything, I probably read more now than I did before entering the industry (shoutout my 50-minute subway commute).

But I read differently now.

If you aren’t afraid of shattering your own illusion, read on to learn four ways that working with books has changed my entire relationship with reading.

New here? I’m Abigail, and I’m a nonfiction publicist at PRH. Read more about me on my About page.

Your personal TBR isn’t personal

One of the funny things about working in publishing—and particularly in publicity and marketing—is learning that the act of “discovering your next read” is much less romantic than it seems.

Let me explain.

Before entering the industry, I think I imagined reading culture as something individual. Like, one person wanders through a bookstore and stumbles upon their next read through sheer instinct and impeccable taste.

Nowadays, I know that most of us are far more influenceable than we’d like to admit.

Covers matter enormously. Titles matter enormously. The little “Read With Jenna” sticker matters enormously. Even whether a book is displayed face-out instead of spine-out matters enormously.

Readers love to think they discovered books organically, but most TBRs are shaped by a myriad of factors: things like author branding, design psychology, recommendation loops, celebrity endorsements, and word of mouth.

To be clear, I’m not exempt from this either. I, too, have purchased books because the cover looked gorgeous, or because the author did a super cool brand deal, or because an influencer I follow said positive things.

The point is not that readers are shallow, but that nobody discovers books in a vacuum.

Literary taste is social positioning

But discoverability is only half the story. The other half is how those books change our appearance. If you’ve ever been accused of “performative reading,” you know what I’m talking about.

People don’t just read books because they enjoy them. They also read books because they communicate things about who we are, or at least who we want to be perceived as.

Why do you think so many celebrities are starting their own book clubs? (And you know what—even if it’s all one big PR stunt, power to them. I am going to listen to Dua Lipa’s music more now.)

We’re seeing entire internet identities form around reading taste, like:

• The hockey romance girl

• The sprayed edges fantasy girl

• The nonfiction productivity guy

• The “I only read translated fiction” guy

…and so on.

Publishing made me realize this isn’t some corruption of literary culture. It is literary culture.

People talk about BookTok as though it ruined reading by making books aesthetic and trend-driven. Respectfully, books have always functioned this way. Reading has never been a purely intellectual activity detached from identity, aspiration, taste, class, or social life.

I understand now that readers are not simply buying a few hours of entertainment. They buying shared references, shared emotional experiences, and shared language with the “in group” of other people who also read that book.

And—why not?—they want pretty bookshelves, too.

It’s not just fiction, either. Have you noticed how many cookbooks no longer feature unflattering photos of chefs holding bowls of pasta on the cover?

Instead, aesthetic, illustrated covers let cookbooks double as gorgeous kitchen decor. Because why own a book that tells people that you know how to cook when it could also say you have excellent taste in interior design?

Publishers are the real psychics

Here’s my favorite one. The internet loves framing publishing as slow, outdated, and behind the curve. Meanwhile, publishers are constantly predicting what people will desperately want to read two years before readers themselves even know they want it.

It’s an absurdly difficult job that frankly deserves more awe.

A book hitting the exact right cultural nerve in 2026 may have been acquired in 2023. Meaning an editor, agent, or publisher had to correctly identify a future emotional appetite before TikTok got ahold of the idea and the rest of the internet caught on.

You try predicting what everyone’s going to be talking about in 2029. God knows I didn’t know what a “tradwife” was three years ago.

Someone outside the industry might see a trendy title and call it “manufactured” and mean that negatively, but from inside publishing, I see manufacturing as nothing short of magical foresight.

Because of that, working in publishing has made me less cynical about hype. When readers complain that publishers are “pushing” a book too aggressively, I often find myself thinking, good for them.

Heck, I’m probably mentally reverse-engineering the campaign behind it to see how I can replicate some of it.

Chalking a book’s “overnight” success up to luck or celebrity fame discounts all the marketers, publicists, sales teams, designers, and editors who labored for months—and sometimes years—to get that book into its best possible position for success.

Midlist books deserve more love

Alright, I’ve just gone on and on about what happens when all the pieces of a book’s production and campaign go just right. But what if they don’t?

Sometimes, schedules shift, production hits snags, trends cool off before publication, too-similar books accidentally publish at the same time, marketing plans fall through, booksellers pass, and algorithms bury posts, all despite your best efforts.

Of course quality of writing matters, but timing matters too. Packaging matters. Luck matters. Cultural mood matters. So many things can go right, but just as many can go wrong.

Virality has distorted the way people think about literary success. Now, if a book isn’t everywhere online within three weeks of publication, readers sometimes subconsciously interpret it as a failure.

But those books still represent years of someone’s life. Years of drafting, revising, editing, pitching, designing, and hoping.

I used to have a innane rule that I wouldn’t pick up a book unless it had hundreds of four-star reviews on Goodreads. Just think of how many amazing books I would have missed out on if I kept that habit! These days, half of the books I read that have three-star ratings or only a handful of reviews online are actually five-star reads for me.

Taste is subjective, and the scale of visibility doesn’t reflect the scale of effort. Don’t be pretentious like high school me, and go give that debut author or “quiet” book a chance.

All to say

I no longer see books as magical objects that appear fully formed on bookstore shelves. I see them as extremely human, extremely risky group projects surviving against enormous odds. Which, strangely enough, makes them feel even more magical than they did before.

I still dog-ear pages, though.

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Unsolicited Manuscript is an independently run newsletter. All opinions are my own and do not reflect the views of my employer, company, or any other organization.