An author isn’t the only person who brought a finished title to life.
My fondness for the acknowledgments section of books runs very deep. Sometimes I flip to them first, though I try to hold off on this guilty pleasure. I love the way they can reveal a writer’s true, gushy self beneath the veneer of authorial control and style, reminding us of the human being who struggled to bring these pages into existence. But acknowledgments also do something else: They show us what a collaborative act it is to produce a book, if only because we get to hear about the writer’s mom, long-suffering spouse, and loyal dog. And, occasionally, an author reveals the identity of some other important but unseen people: agents, editors, publicists, book-cover designers, fact-checkers.
In an essay this week on Dan Sinykin’s book about publishing, Big Fiction, Josh Lambert evokes this wider workforce. Sinykin’s book sets out to show how conglomeration among publishing houses has affected the kinds of novels we read. Though Lambert isn’t convinced that Sinykin has achieved that objective, he does applaud the effort at further transparency around how books are actually made, and offers this intriguing suggestion: If movies and TV shows include extensive credits, why shouldn’t books? “Would it really be so difficult to have a credits page that acknowledges the contributions of the folks responsible for layout, marketing, and proofreading?” he asks.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
The proposal is a modest one. And Lambert isn’t the first to consider it; the idea has been bubbling for years. In 2022, Lisa Lucas, who oversees the Pantheon and Schocken imprints, tweeted out her support for a credits page along the lines of what Lambert suggests: “It’s a damn shame that most people don’t know how many people it takes to make a book!” One author who took up the challenge was Malcolm Harris, whose book Palo Alto we wrote about earlier this year. He asked for a page that would list everyone who’d been involved in the creation of his book, from the legal counsel to the publicity intern. “I think everyone who works on a book should be able to point to their name in it forever, and I’m proud that’ll be the case with this one,” Harris tweeted. Molly McGhee recently did the same for her first book, crediting her agent, marketing team, contracts manager, and writing teachers.
The idea hasn’t exactly taken off, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Authorship is commonly imagined as an act of lone genius, as if a book emerges from the brain of a writer like Athena springing fully formed from the head of Zeus. Don’t get me wrong: The process of writing a book is, for the most part, a very solitary one—I’ve written two books, and each one required whole years of sitting in rooms by myself, knowing that it was entirely up to me and my will as to whether a book would come into being. But this is only part of the struggle, and many, many people are involved in getting a book into a reader’s hands.
An editor—especially a brilliant one, as I’ve been lucky to have—pushes against your ideas, hones your writing, demands that you express yourself with the utmost clarity. The publicity-and-marketing team helps frame how the book will be received. The art director designs a cover that will determine what a reader will feel before they even flip to the first page. The best copy editors can give the book the smoothness of a taut bedsheet. Foreign-rights agents make sure that people in other countries can read your words. It would take nothing away from an author to give them all their due—in fact, in an industry with sadly little remuneration, it would only add to these publishing professionals’ feeling of investment in the creative work they’ve helped bring into the world.
The holiday season is a good time to stop and consider all of the unnoticed labor that makes a book possible. These people, along with my favorite writers, have my gratitude for the pleasure they’ve brought me this past year, even if their work doesn’t always get the appreciation it deserves.
The Invisible Forces Behind the Books We Read
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
In 1871, when Eliot was writing Middlemarch, Britain had recently undergone some 40 years of social upheaval. The First and Second Reform Acts enfranchised men of lower means and pedigree, broadening the voting public to include more than just the wealthy and noble few. But her mammoth novel takes place in the lead-up to that change, exploring the tensions between rich and poor, rural and urban, old and new. The story follows Dorothea Brooke, a wealthy and pious 19-year-old orphan living with her sister and her uncle, and Tertius Lydgate, a sweetly naive and eager doctor, as each falls in love, marries, and discovers that a lot follows the expected happily-ever-after. Subplots abound, of course, as this is a lengthy and intricate “Study of Provincial Life” (the novel’s subtitle), but the love triangles, political maneuvering, and intricate gossip in the titular English town make for a thrilling read. This is a book about wonderfully and frustratingly messy people. — Ilana Masad
From our list: Six classic books that live up to their reputation
Everyone Should Be Reading Palestinian Poetry
Recently, while reading the cookbook Jerusalem, I was struck by an observation made by its co-authors, an Israeli chef and a Palestinian chef, in the introduction. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi write that food “seems to be the only unifying force” in Jerusalem, a city claimed as the capital of both Israel and Palestine. Despite their cuisine’s fraught history, the chefs consider the preparation of meals to be a uniquely human act—an unspoken language shared between two people who might otherwise be enemies.
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The Case for a Credits Section in Books
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22.12.2023
An author isn’t the only person who brought a finished title to life.
My fondness for the acknowledgments section of books runs very deep. Sometimes I flip to them first, though I try to hold off on this guilty pleasure. I love the way they can reveal a writer’s true, gushy self beneath the veneer of authorial control and style, reminding us of the human being who struggled to bring these pages into existence. But acknowledgments also do something else: They show us what a collaborative act it is to produce a book, if only because we get to hear about the writer’s mom, long-suffering spouse, and loyal dog. And, occasionally, an author reveals the identity of some other important but unseen people: agents, editors, publicists, book-cover designers, fact-checkers.
In an essay this week on Dan Sinykin’s book about publishing, Big Fiction, Josh Lambert evokes this wider workforce. Sinykin’s book sets out to show how conglomeration among publishing houses has affected the kinds of novels we read. Though Lambert isn’t convinced that Sinykin has achieved that objective, he does applaud the effort at further transparency around how books are actually made, and offers this intriguing suggestion: If movies and TV shows include extensive credits, why shouldn’t books? “Would it really be so difficult to have a credits page that acknowledges the contributions of the folks responsible for layout, marketing, and proofreading?” he asks.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books........
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