The State of the Heart

American book publishing: What is, in the fashionable phrase, the state of the art?

Well, to start with, it's not an art, it's a business…

Ours can be a quiet or a spectacular business; it is surely an interesting and a quirky business. It may be frustrating or fulfilling, ethical or dubious, but the people who survive in publishing are those who have learned…how to run a business (and) the ones who will prosper, especially spiritually, are the individuals fortunate enough to find that what they have is not just a job but a vocation…

Comparing publishing to other businesses, there is…one…major difference: The book, unlike many of its cultural cousins the movie, the magazine, the play, the newspaper, the television show or series is the work of an individual. Except for the occasional collaboration, one person has written it; except in schools or in public readings, one person at a time "uses" it. In a corporate, collaborative, conglomerating age, the book remains the stronghold of the individual…

Still, such satisfactions could have nothing to do with the questions of why (or if) you should be in publishing…Here is where the sense of vocation, the state of the heart, comes in. For publishing offers each of us a chance regularly to test our ideas and opinions, our judgment, our abilities and beliefs; to face moral, commercial, or artistic dilemmas; to rise to an occasion. And publishing, any kind of publishing, offers more occasions to rise to than baking or ballooning…

If, as others have said, this is a business where you get paid for doing what you enjoy doing anyhow, publishing could sound suspiciously like the world's oldest profession. But much of the time it is the real thing. It is love.