The Longer I Work in Publishing, the More I'm Convinced It's Sorcery, Psychology, and Guesswork (Digest)
One of the things I love most about Substack is that there are no rules. If I wake up one day and decide I want to add a new column called Side Bar with narrative essays on the industry, then I can just do that.
So I did.
This week, I published my first literary rant. I hope you enjoy.
Job Board
Fractional Publishing Operations Manager/Author Platform Coordinator - Blackstone Press
Acquisitions Editor/Senior Acquisitions Editor, Arts & Crafts - Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
Production Editor, Union Square Kids - Hachette Book Group
Publicity & Marketing Manager - Hachette Book Group
Manager, Leadership Development & Talent Programs - Penguin Random House LLC
Senior Designer, Random House Children’s Books - Penguin Random House LLC
Summer Remote Marketing Internship, Zeitgeist - Penguin Random House LLC
College Publishing Sales Representative - W.W. Norton & Company
Have a job opening to add to the list? Shoot me a DM.
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.
I'm going to go out on the limb and imagine that Penguin Random House are too big to roll the dice on anything even though they should have the financial club to be able to do that. However our book is the most extraordinary event ever to hit the publishing industry. You simply can't overestimate how fantastic it is to finally have the explanation of everything. It can only happen once in all of human history and it will permanently divide all of our human history into before and after because it's going to affect absolutely everything in their lives. Once these ideas get into the heads of our talented people we will have a tsunami of progress and each time a new discovery is made it will sell books!
The randomness that you're talking about and difficulties are because people do not think any longer. I had a publisher reject me decades ago because he said I had to go through the hazing process of getting a degree in physics and arguing with them and making it obvious, becoming famous and then he would consider my book if it was well written. Absolutely mind-blowing how close-minded people can be.
I'm trying to save Civilization by launching the monks knowledge Renaissance. They have the theory of everything and it's overwhelmingly obvious by the fact that they can explain mystery after mystery after mystery all around us and our theoretical physicists with their standard model of physics are totally confused telling us ridiculous stories and admitting themselves that they cannot use them to explain more than 5% of the universe. They admit they do not understand 95% of the universe but you can't talk to a publisher that you can explain 100% even though everyone wants to know how the universe is going to end. And everyone wants to understand the true structure of things around us so that we can improve batteries or understand what chemical reactions mean and where the energy comes from. This is civilization trying to turn from a caterpillar into a butterfly and the publishing industry that is collapsing simply will not get on board to the biggest event in human history!
My co-author is the director of communications at a international software company. He's so excited about this and finishing up editing our book Light Orbits and wants me working on using the articles I've just posted on substack to do a critical book of science while being polite.
We're working on that now, but if you'd like to see the research we're doing on our book you should go to my co-authors publication. Try Google searching: medium Light Orbits and especially read his wonderful chapter called Validations. There he does a beautiful job of explaining that we are not arguing with the facts of science we are arguing with the conclusions about the facts of science.
If you'd like to make a fortune representing us we would be thrilled because this is going to cause a tsunami of progress overnight.
"What difference does it make that scholars worked out fancy theories and mathematics for levers when practical people have been using these devices for centuries?
The point is, use without theory is largely hit and miss.
Advances are made, but slowly.
Once a useful theory is worked out it's like removing a blindfold. It becomes obvious how a device might be improved and progress speeds up enormously." - Isaac Asimov
Methinks its reaching a point when writers are outnumbering writers!!