Another Blast from the Past

Hello again! So far we’ve gone from Waldenbooks to the National Outdoor Leadership School to the Denver Publishing Institute (spanning about ten years) in my journey to becoming a development editor and book coach. Thanks for coming along with me as I paint in broad strokes, while adding a few highlights, who and what experiences have shaped me and my editorial style. You can find my first three posts in the archives on Substack or here on the blog page of my website.

Without further ado:

I left off last week with a wonderful memory from DPI and it got me thinking about the Master of Arts degree I was working on during this same time via Alaska Pacific University (APU). I wondered if there was a live link to my thesis somewhere on the Web, but I could only confirm that there is still a hard copy on file at the university’s library. So I placed one on hold and then dug up my old computer files in order to write this post.

The title of my thesis was Relevance at Risk: How Independent Book Publishing May Thrive in a Digital Age. You have to know, I studied and wrote this in 2007, when ebooks still felt like a threat to traditional publishing models and publishers hadn’t yet fully harnessed the power of their content in the digital realm.

I took the angle of questioning how emerging technologies (that is, up to 2007) had enabled the preservation of independent book publishers in particular. I cast independent publishers in contrast to the Big 5 publishing conglomerates, and the bulk of my thesis was a case study on the indie press Chelsea Green Publishing (with a current presence here on Substack via The Chelsea Green Foundation, writing about “creative and critical thinking that inspires ecological and societal resilience.”)

Here is my thesis abstract in case you’re interested:

Web publishing, digital content, self-publishing, on-demand printing, digitizing and search-optimizing text, and the networked book are all products of the technological revolution in an information age. Influences of these digital technologies have challenged every aspect of the book publishing industry, and independent publishers are struggling to integrate technology with traditional practices to sustain their businesses in a rapidly changing industry. This case study spotlights Chelsea Green Publishing, an independent house in White River Junction, Vermont, as an example of how independent publishers may publish and promote books in a variety of different digital media formats; develop Web communities and online content to foster author relations and support book sales; and brand themselves as the authority on their topic. Results examine, synthesize, and discuss how publishers may transition to a business model that incorporates e-commerce while supporting the 500-year-old tradition of a value-driven industry focused on selling quality books.

(And I’ve posted the full 91-page document for my Substack paid subscribers if you’d like to really geek out with me!)

This is all to say, here we are 17 years later, and independent publishers are still going strong in a publishing landscape that has only opened even wider since I wrote my thesis. I could probably write a entire second thesis updating the scene for not only Chelsea Green but the other numerous small houses and hybrid presses that are now servings authors overlooked by the ever-harder-to-break-into Big 5 houses.

There are others doing a better job at that than I could though (I particularly like Brooke Warner’s perspectives and experiences in her newsletter Writerly Things), but it does bring me to a point that soundly supports the dawn of the role of book coaches. At the risk of fast forwarding too much at this point in my newsletter series, I’ll mention that I was trained as a book coach by the talented and generous Jennie Nash, but even before I took that step I could sense the need for freelance editors as advocates and partners for authors in the rapidly changing publishing landscape. Jennie has simply formalized the process and created a vibrate community in which book coaches are not only held to really high standards but are becoming more and more recognized for their role in the ecosystem. (Seriously, check her out.)

So there I was in 2006 and 2007, finishing up my master’s degree and headed back to NOLS to work full-time (promoted from intern!) and practice what I’d learn so far about book publishing from self-study and DPI. NOLS had an established backlist of titles related to their outdoor and leadership curriculum, and I was excited to help develop a few new front list titles (I swear there is a full post on this coming soon).

Book coaching as a formal title for myself wouldn’t come for over another decade, but I feel like I’ve always been operating in the interest of authors as individuals, not as commodities. As I say in my thesis:

When I chose to pursue my Master of Arts in book publishing . . ., becoming an editor, to me, meant the thrill of working with writers through the creative processes and production steps of publishing manuscripts of entertaining or educational value. I wanted to inquire through specific research how the very field I was entering was potentially changing, for better or worse.

I’d love it if you checked out the full thesis, if only as an exercise in finding in it some historical significance (even if it’s not entirely relevant 17 years later).

Thanks for being here! I’m looking forward to sharing my experiences editing for NOLS next week.