It would be easy to sneer at this Guardian article about the current state of book publishing - as indeed the likes of David Quantick have - and talking of "an industry-wide mental health crisis", as one of Alice Kemp-Habib's interviewees did, arguably exaggerates the scale of the situation in an unhelpful way.
But the experience of that interviewee, Imogen Hermes Gowar, should nevertheless be taken seriously. There is a duty of care towards authors, especially debutants, or at very least a responsibility for expectation management that falls on publishers. If the industry is serious about diversifying, then there has to be solid support in place for those who, like Gowar, suddenly find themselves in an unfamiliar world and "treated like the most important person in the room" for the first time in their lives. This is precisely why so many musicians go off the rails, having been unprepared for the level of attention and exposure that success in the public eye brings and having no boundaries or roadmap to work with.
At the same time, though, the article acknowledges that publishers themselves are under severe strain. That those working in trade publishing are overworked and underpaid came as little surprise to someone with experience on the academic side of the fence. New measures and resources are on their way to help authors, but the pressures that publishing staff are under should not be forgotten either.
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