Two Words That Explain Everything About Traditional Publishing

"Text risk"

High-stakes poker played well is boring to watch, because the dealt hands are rarely seen. The best players infer hidden information with reasonable fidelity, fold early when the odds of winning the hand are poor or uncertain, and model each other’s strategies well enough that showdowns tend only to occur when someone makes a mistake. The best players don’t necessarily win more hands than anyone else; they know when and how to bet.

The cards do matter, because the threat of a showdown with a bad hand is always present. Still, in skilled play, where most hands are won uncontested in the betting phase, it often looks like they don’t.

Something unpleasant people learn early in corporate jobs is that managers don’t exist to make their subordinates excellent or even productive; they exist to reduce risk in and around their own role. Low performers are a source of risk, but so are excessively high performers. It’s not that bosses are bad people, just as individual landlords are not bad people; the institution of management, achieving its design purpose for executives and shareholders, is what makes us suffer. At work, we would like to live in a world where our talents—latent variables, like hole cards in poker—matter. Our bosses are best at their jobs if they factor out risk.

It’s well known that text is a low-ranking concern in traditional publishing. Comps, hooks, and word count determine whether the book is accepted and what the size of the deal will be. The book may or may not be read in its entirety by one person; often, the first person to read it in full is the copyeditor. The others skim it, and what they’re looking for is not a sense of the work’s quality, because traditional publishing has plenty of experience making sure products of general low quality sell just fine, but text risk. That’s the literal term. To how much risk does this sentence expose us? To how much risk does the next sentence expose us? What’s the sum total risk? Is it below our threshold?

All writers dread the rare but fateful mistake that changes everything. Most typos are minimal and can be fixed in a later edition; a few are catastrophic. Two printers in 1631 who missed a word the King James Bible—“thou shalt (not) commit adultery”—were ruined. Text risk is the Sword of Damocles for traditional publishing. What if the name of a minor character triggers a lawsuit? What if the typesetting on page 312 is unintentionally offensive? What if a travel influencer, failing to recognize that correctio is an ancient rhetorical device, believes the fourth sentence (“the phone rang, but it wasn’t my boyfriend—it was a vampire”) was written by AI?

It’s not that text doesn’t matter. Worse than that, text is risk. And what do relationship-brokering businesses hate? Risk.

This is why one’s fate in traditional publishing has next to nothing to do with the quality of one’s writing. You should write your book as well as you can because you care about readers, or for reasons of personal pride, or because you want the story to be taught in universities in twenty years. You should not expect traditional publishing to notice or care. Publishing would prefer a world with zero text risk—a world in which people buy their products but never read them.