Employee parking. Image – Getty: Kurga
By Arpita Das | @arpitayodapress
‘How Staff and Freelance Editors Are Treated’
After the overwhelming response to my last column on how more hybrid offices help the workplace spirit and atmosphere, I decided to move into more controversial terrain and do some research on how staff and freelance editors are being treated by the industry.I first began to speak to young freelance editors, and soon realized that many of them were employed by publishing houses as staff editors, and that the freelance project was their “second gig.”
Arpita Das
This was not particularly surprising to me. Throughout my working life as a copyeditor, editor, and commissioning editor with well-known trade and academic publishers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I took on freelance editorial projects with organizations in the development sector. My partner and I had just set up home in posh and expensive South Delhi, and paying the rent needed some serious out-of-the-box adulting by us, even for the matchbox-sized studio “barsati” apartment we lived in back then.
After I started Yoda Press, the office took on paid editorial and production projects with development sector organizations to keep the office afloat and, later, even to pay salaries. Returns on our fledgling list took time to flow back in and were not substantial enough to begin with. From the very start, I had a policy that all our employees were free to have second gigs if they needed to, because as a small, independent publishing house, I had to be aware that we might not be paying the best salaries to them. After all, living in the capital city has only become more expensive with time.
So, it did not surprise me in the least that assistant editors who were in entry-level positions at a variety of publishing houses were taking on second gigs as freelance editors in the industry, even now. What did surprise me though was what they were being paid for these freelance editorial projects. One young editor left me so gobsmacked by saying she had just been quoted 20 paise per word for a 70,000-word manuscript with a time line of two weeks, that when I heard another editor say 70 paise per word for a similar length and timeline, I actually remarked (causing me to feel great shame later), ‘Oh that’s not so bad.’
The fact is that around the time I was in my last full-time job in the publishing industry back in the early 2000s, just before starting up Yoda Press, most big houses were beginning to move toward making their editorial departments leaner—and having the ones they retained supervise a constant supply chain of badly paid freelance editors who did the actual editing.
At a time when budget sheets showing person-hours and ending up with P&L projections for all signed-up titles were becoming more important than the actual material of the manuscript, this was par for the course.
The trend later accelerated, with a couple of particularly shameful accounts of entire editorial teams being laid off overnight by even large houses in the industry. In the current scenario—at every seminar and conference the buzz seems to be about how much AI can take over editorial roles—ours is sadly an industry that appears to be bent on diminishing the very people and erasing the very roles that had the capacity to chisel knowledge bases into their best possible form.
‘Pocket-Money Pay Slips’
What makes the status of freelance editors and the way they’re treated even more tenuous is that—aside from a few honorable alternatives—publishing houses strongly discourage young editors from taking on second gigs, even to the extent of firing them immediately if they’re found out. Once again, this doesn’t surprise me as much as it outrages me.
“I often hear senior members of the industry lamenting that the best young minds are hard to retain. The question is what are we doing to retain them?”Arpita Das
An assistant editor at an entry-level position with an undergraduate degree is generally being paid in the range of 3,00,000 to 3,60,000 rupees per year [US$3,455 to $4,146]. This might increase to somewhere in the range of 5,00,000 rupees per year [US$5,759] if an editor has a master of arts degree and costs are high, as in a city like Delhi, often considered the hub of publishing in India.
This logically means that you continue to live with your parents, which in turn means that you are a Delhi native to begin with.
One of the biggest and longest-standing complaints I’ve heard about publishing in India over the last three decades is how it’s so Delhi-centric. Well, there’s no chance of this changing any time soon with entry-level jobs paying too little to attract youngsters from other parts of the country who would have to consider a change in city of residence—or they just have to belong to super-privileged/super-rich households.
As one spunky mid-level editor in a scholarly publishing house told me, “Working in publishing seems to be unfortunately mostly for the privileged few who don’t mind the pocket-money pay slip in their early career phase.”
In effect, as long as only those who need “pocket-money pay slips” feel they can be a part of our industry, how can our offices be truly diverse and inclusive?
Another former editor-in-chief at a large children’s book publishing house added to my understanding of the problem when she said, “Publishing in India seems to be the province of a privileged elite (both in terms of class and caste) who have a patronizing attitude towards writers, editors, artists and any staffers not in sales or marketing.” She added, wryly, “Or they have that attitude that means ‘I suffered and made it to where I am, so should you.'”
‘A Long, Hard Look at Our Own Responsibility’
The people at the top are indeed responsible for most of the problem, so I suppose their dodgy attitude is the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed here.
“The time is ripe for a transparent discussion in our industry about what young people who do a lot of the work are being paid vs. what CEOs in their cushy jobs are pocketing.”Arpita Das
What makes it worse is that CEOs in Indian publishing are raking in anywhere between 1,00,00,000 and 2,00,00,000 rupees per year [US$115,191 to $230,386] and publishing directors are being paid 40,00,000 to 60,00,000 rupees per year [US$46,076 to $69,115]. The publishing directors are, of course, mostly women, and the CEOs are largely men, but that’s a topic for another column.
As one spirited publishing head of an independent press pointed out to me, “When the majority of the money coming into the company goes to those at the top, the ones starting their careers—or even those who have given a few years to the company—are the ones to suffer. The fact that really good minds leave publishing after only a few years is in large part because of this.”
And therein lies the rub. The industry’s people constantly complain about the drain of its young professionals in favor of jobs in such fields as film and television production, or in advertising, development, or mainstream media. I often hear senior members of the industry lamenting that the best young minds are hard to retain. The question is what are we doing to retain them?
What’s more, the lack of diversity in our offices is a serious issue, considering we are increasingly dealing with an increasingly diverse author pool. Young people who join the industry are generally from Delhi, or from the bigger metropolitan areas like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata, and almost always are supported by their well-to-do parents, which in turn implies what the editors I spoke to pointed out so eloquently earlier—that publishing remains a job prospect only for privileged young people.
A few months ago, a close German friend of mine who has been part of the cultural scene in her country for two decades or so pointed out to me that even there, the publishing industry remains the domain for those with generational wealth. The former editor-in-chief I spoke to added to this by saying, “As far as I understand it, even staff editors at lower levels are struggling worldwide because of too much work—editing on weekends and after work is technically unpaid overtime—for too little pay.
From a Discord conversation with a former editor at a Big Five in the United States, I found out that a staff editor is also expected to be a project manager, leaving her perhaps 10 hours of editing time in-office in a year. From what I hear, greedy corporates that don’t share profits—a cross-industry problem—to hire more staff or pay editors adequately, whether staff editors or freelancers, “are the major problem.”
She added with a crestfallen tone in her voice, “For instance, my company whined about paying interns a 2,000-rupee stipend while blithely overlooking any losses in the lakhs because of mismanagement. But yes, if a transparent discussion on pay and contracts is possible as an industry standard, as in the way the Writers Guild of America works in the US, there would be nothing like it.”
I couldn’t agree more. The time is ripe for a transparent discussion in our industry about what young people who do a lot of the work are being paid vs. what CEOs in their cushy jobs are pocketing.
It’s also time for managers to get real about how vital second gigs are for young professionals looking to build lives in expensive cities. And, if we truly care for greater diversity and inclusiveness in our industry, it’s incumbent on us to take a long, hard look at our own responsibility and accountability in creating an industry devoid of both.
Join us for Arpita Das’ columns to come. Additional coverage of her work from Publishing Perspectives is here. Arpita Das’ opinions are her own, of course, and not necessarily reflective of those of Publishing Perspectives.