The Hidden World of Publishing

The Colorado River flows through the Grand Canyon and is plainly visible to a person standing on the rim looking in. The water-worn earth frames the river in sculpted and sandy edges left by alternately thundering or meandering waters.

Vast aquifers, in contrast, exist beneath the surface of the Earth’s crust. Without active and intentional monitoring an aquifer could easily be entirely ignored or overexploited.

Publishing has become a pursuit mostly hidden by the sheer noise of so many voices* posting in unison on a regular basis—some of the material is fantastic and some entirely banal. In the race to generate content and “be seen” (a blatant exploitation of a reader’s precious awareness) much of that content is a repackaged, stripped-of-its-origin, parroted pablum for followers with only half an interest in what is being said. How does a person find the fantastic amongst the clutter? How much are we missing because of banality that sends us along a different tangent?

Publishing has never been a particularly lucrative pursuit unless you had a golden mind moving the pen of a best-selling author, backed by a huge publisher capable of mounting a marketing campaign to draw attention to an upcoming release. Even this practice has been lost in the noise. I can’t remember the last time I was keenly aware of, much less anticipated, the release of a book. I suspect it may have been Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows released in 2007. That means the awareness of a specific book’s release has not registered in my mind for the past 12 years. That is a sobering fact for a person working in publishing.

The opportunity to publish is now egalitarian, and as I type this article, I’m selfishly grateful because if the opportunity it provides. I wouldn’t necessarily want to reverse that trend. Asking for your attention, however, should cost me some time and effort in the writing as a fair trade.

In the pursuit of adding a little extra value, I’ll share with you a recent investment I made in the slow consumption of well-written and researched articles dispersed via quality publishing. I took out a subscription to The Economist. The magazine asks a lot of time from the reader, but the reader gets a wealth of knowledge in return.

Fantastic.

*126,000,000 Twitter users (theverge.com); 2,410,000,000 Facebook users (statista.com) as of this writing.