Here’s an Escher-like (or Moebius strip) twisting story of where publishing’s going, and as a tiny part of it, how my ironic career goes. (I add my subjective angle not so much for what my own peripatetic career reflects on the industry, but to suggest how your small-scale work for big companies in the past may make you wonder where you’d stand today if you did similar for the successor big company. Among other things.)
Pearson PLC is the British-based corporate owner of Penguin, the trade-book publisher. Pearson also owns Pearson Education, which owns Prentice Hall and the successor to Silver Burdett Ginn/Scott Foresman, and other educational publishers that used to be separate smaller companies. (This is a rough sum. A slightly longer account of part of this is in my June 22 blog entry.) Prentice Hall’s URL appears to be this now, and the URL for the successor to SBG/Scott Foresman is this.
Penguin, the trade publisher, publishes the likes of Thomas Pynchon. I have had no professional relationship with Penguin.
As it turned out, I had worked at Prentice Hall, first (in its School division) through a placement agency (1997-98), and later directly employed as a freelancer (in its Higher Education division, specifically in the Humanities and Social Sciences supplements department) in 2001 and 2002. This was after a decade I worked within generally typical publishing jobs, and when (not to be defensive, but to contrast with Internet-based attitudes) I was generally respected as a publishing professional. Though doing production work for supplements in 2001 and 2002 was small-time in its way, it was having a fairly significant role in producing books of a kind.
Then, putting it summarily, “life as what happens when you’re making other plans” came along, and my status in the trade-book realm took a hit as is suggested in some of my earliest blog entries, and I’ve been self-publishing a few books of mine, not with any service that you pay, and not that I make any money with this.
Now, along comes the news Pearson is buying Author Solutions (see this release).
Maybe the culmination of all this is when we can all go online, and put into production a self-pub’d book with a title like Vanquishing Hitler: Vampire Wars 6000, and end up being established (how exactly, I’m not sure) within the great cultural pantheon whose works are curated (by such companies as Prentice Hall) among giants like Kant, Goethe, Darwin, Justin Bieber, and all the others.
