AI, The End of the English Major, and Book Publishing's Ageism Problem

Dissecting what it all means. (8-minute read)

I gave a lot of thought to what I would write in my inaugural newsletter. I considered many topics, such as the failed S&S-PRH merger, what happens to S&S next, the perils of over-relying on BookTok, and…you get the picture. I will undoubtedly write about all of those things and more. But right now, I want to discuss more pressing matters.

As you’re probably aware, ChatGPT, a form of Open AI (Artificial Intelligence), has a lot of people in an uproar. However, if you’re not familiar with ChatGPT, do not worry because I asked it to explain itself in the most basic way possible, and here’s the answer:

“I'm ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI. I'm designed to understand natural language and generate human-like responses to various prompts or questions. I've been trained on a massive dataset of text from the internet and books, which allows me to generate coherent and relevant responses to a wide variety of questions and topics.

When you ask me a question or give me a prompt, I analyze the input using natural language processing techniques and then generate a response that I think best answers your question or addresses your prompt. I'm constantly learning and updating my knowledge base based on new data, so I can continue to improve my responses over time.”

In other words, ChatGPT is kind of like Google without providing links that you can click on to read more about a subject via a source on the internet. That is if one were to use it simplistically. Of course, it can’t tell us where the information it provides comes from, and it isn’t always accurate, but having tried it myself over the past month or so, I know it helps simplify complex concepts for an MBA class. I also know that ChatGPT is not a great writer, which brings me to the next.

While certain media outlets are now disclosing that they have been or are going to use AI for listicles and articles, the slight panic that it might upend the book publishing industry is, in my opinion, overblown. You could ask ChatGPT to write a story, but that doesn’t mean it qualifies as literature. You could—and people have—self-publish a book written by AI, but there is such a glutton of self-published books on Amazon that it wouldn’t make a dent. Not now, anyway. And yes, a literary journal had to close queries because it was flooded with AI submissions (I’m still scratching my head about this because don’t quite understand why this particular publication received so many of them). All this is to say that AI will not immediately replace human authors of books. Where I see it working best, and perhaps this is a risk, is nonfiction books. It isn’t hard to imagine someone with an idea for a self-help book asking ChatGPT specific questions and then using the responses to fill the pages of a proposal. Nor is it hard to imagine someone writing a biography and using the information provided by ChatGPT to complete a chapter. These realistic scenarios will make the jobs of editors and agents more laborious than they already are. People in those positions will really need to know their stuff (meaning, material from other books and news sources) to identify what looks familiar in a proposal.

Book Publishing’s true reckoning with ChatGPT will come in the form of metadata. Currently, ChatGPT only pulls information from sources up to 2021. That means it isn’t familiar with books published in 2022 and on. Why does this matter? It matters because search is equated with discoverability, and discoverability of books on the internet has everything to do with keywords, which are included in the metadata for every title, as is the title’s category (or, BISAC, as we in the biz say), price, format, etc. When you think about Microsoft and Google pivoting search, which is powered by something akin to ChatGPT, you must also consider how consumers will search for books. How will metadata integrate with ChatGPT? That is yet to be seen, but it should be top-of-mind for publishers.

This is an excellent segue into the topic of a recent piece in The New Yorker entitled "The End of the English Major." Full disclosure: I was an English major as an undergrad student at Rutgers-Newark and graduated with a BA in the subject. I’m now entering my second year of an MBA program at Southern New Hampshire University, which is relevant to the story. I could tell you that I became an English major because of my love for Jane Austen, but I’d be lying. As an 18-year-old in community college, I was incredibly lost, so I chose a business major because it seemed practical back in 1990. An English professor asked me to stay after class one day to talk about an essay I had written about my grandmother dying, and what do you know, an English major was born. Don’t get me wrong, I have always loved books and begged my parents for book fair money when I was a kid, but once I entered my teen years, I read Jackie Collins, not Jane Austen. Like I suspect many others did, I romanticized the idea of working in book publishing while my father pleaded for me to go to law school. That is a story for another day.

As I read The New Yorker piece, I was struck by how English departments dug in their heels and expected students to naturally gravitate towards the major. That may have worked 20 years ago, but it will not work in a world where most people spend more time reading articles and social media feeds on their phones instead of picking up a book. If colleges want to interest students in becoming English majors, they must make a concerted effort to highlight career possibilities outside academia and publishing. Why not create a program combining a Marketing or Communications major with an English minor? English majors have a great skill set: reading, analyzing, and writing about text. They are creative. They gain a broader worldview because they are readers.

Book Publishing programs are also on the hook for broadening the minds of English majors who filter through them. Students should be taught what skills are transferable from one area of book publishing to another. You can be a publicist and eventually edit a book. You can work in marketing and someday become a literary agent. You can also work in book publishing and use the skills you’ve acquired in the industry to move on to an entirely different one, all stemming from being an English major. It is possible—but students need to know that.

My final musing in this edition of Publishing Confidential is about a sensitive-to-me topic: Ageism. When I turned 50 last summer, I didn’t have a job but was in the throes of some interviews, and let’s just say it was pretty humbling. In the back of my head, I knew any potential employer would see my resume or LinkedIn profile and know I was not a spring chicken. Some interviews went so well that I thought I’d surely receive an offer. Except I didn’t. Book Publishing is a gossipy industry, so I always found out who was hired, and every single time it was someone at least 10-15 years younger than me. In hindsight, it was the best thing that ever happened to me because it led me to start my own PR firm, but at the time, it made me depressed.

Ageism in book publishing isn’t discussed much, but it should be. If you follow a certain anonymous Instagram account, then you may have gotten a glance at a leaked email from the CEO of Hachette to staff explaining that the company is facing fiscal challenges just like many other companies are in the “current macro environment” (If I had a dime for every sentence where I read that phrase lately, I’d be rich). One of the cost-saving measures outlined in the email was a “Voluntary Resignation Program” that offers employees ages 50 and over, with at least 15 years at the company, an opportunity to resign and take a “favorable severance package.” I don’t know about you, but 50 isn’t even close to retirement age in this economy, and certainly not in book publishing. A joke often told in the industry is that people don’t retire from book publishing until they die. I think that’s still true, and there are definitely people who have overstayed their welcome in the industry, but when you ask people who have barely opened their membership offer from AARP to resign voluntarily, what you are saying is: We want to eliminate higher salaries and give more work to junior employees without paying them substantially more. You are also saying that you don’t value institutional knowledge, mentorship, or good leadership that comes with years of experience (sidenote: not everyone who has years of experience is a good leader, but you get my point).

I want young people to work in book publishing and stay in the industry. I want to see more diversity, better pay, and manageable workloads. The problem is, none of that will happen if you reduce staff but keep publishing the same number of books—or more—that make the workloads of employees untenable. Efficiency in book publishing will not be born from a skeleton crew that is burnt out with low pay. Some of us who are 50 have experienced the industry from the moment the internet invaded the mainstream, when Kindle supposedly foreshadowed the printed book's demise, and Twitter had a fail whale. We know a thing or two; many of us are raising Gen Z, your next big customers. Don’t count us out, we have quite a few things left to teach others in the industry.

What I’m Reading: The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schafler

What I’m Watching: Sex/Life (Netflix) and re-watching Succession, seasons 1 & 2

What I’m Listening to, Podcast Edition: Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, On with Kara Swisher, On the Media, Post Reports (Washington Post), and Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend

What I’m Listening to, Music Edition: De La Soul on streaming for the first time!

Morning Reads: NY Times, Axios AM, The Information, The Wall Street Journal, Media Star, NY Post, and my current fave, The Broadsheet, which is a female-focused newsletter by Fortune. It’s really great.