An early morning email greeted me on the publication of my second book, Pure Land in the Making.
The email caught me by surprise. I knew the book would be out in 2021. Still, I hadn’t anticipated its arrival to be announced so early to the world. I didn’t yet hold a book in my hands. A few hours later, the editor emailed. She hadn’t seen the book either. The staff worked from home, scattered around the city, everyone working on their piece of the publication puzzle. And while the book had been printed, it was not yet published. Now stored in an East Coast warehouse, the book would not be “out” on February 15, 2021. The pipeline had not yet come to an end.
The Trouble with Pipelines
Authors often refer to the publishing pipeline. The metaphor captures the transformative process by which a manuscript is submitted and then turned into a publication. Keep two things in the pipeline! Maintain a publishing pipeline!
While a useful metaphor, the metaphor can break down. What flows through the pipeline is not a steady stream. A pipeline can leak. Sometimes it even gets clogged. And on occasion, it opens with a huge gush.
Publishing is not the only sector that uses the metaphor of pipeline. It is also a beloved metaphor for the tech industry. But in the case of tech, the pipeline refers to people, not manuscripts. And it is often talked about in terms of failure.
Senior engineer at Intel, Melissa Gregg, challenges the “pipeline problem” of the STEM fields. The pipeline failure attributes the low numbers of women and people of color participate in STEM fields (science-technology-engineering-mathematics) to a problem upstream. Recruit more diverse students into STEM courses if you want to produce a more diverse corps of scientists and engineers downstream.
But Gregg points out that this metaphor mistakes social and cultural problems for an engineering one. Her wry description of the pipeline is worth quoting: “Once a person is in the funnel, the rest is easy—sheer force and momentum will ensure progress to the desired destination.” But funnels, like pipelines, are not airtight canisters designed to hurdle small particles to the end. They are made of social relations and individual aspirations.
Gregg points out various ways in which the metaphor itself fails. Vanishing job security and evolving skill sets introduce other vectors that disrupt the “sheer force and momentum.” People interact with others, bundles of ambition and anxiety. In those interactions, some values are reinforced, while others overlooked or even rejected. For this reason, Gregg celebrates the leaky pipeline, “a sign of worker’s agency—of their empowerment and willingness to leave intransigent cultures that don’t align with their values.”
The Publishing Pipeline
So let’s return to the publishing pipeline. Manuscripts aren’t people, but Gregg provides a starting point to ask if the idea of a funnel and sheer force and momentum may also obscure how we understand why some authors move their work through the pipeline and others do not. As in the tech field, job security has a lot to do with it. Technical skills matter as well. The social elements, be they readers or editors or co-authors or even ourselves as authors, also shape the pipeline.
Let’s take Gregg’s quote, “Once a person is in the funnel, the rest is easy—sheer force and momentum will ensure progress to the desired destination.” I want to break down those forces and momentum because a publishing pipeline is not so smooth. What joints link the author’s labor with the labor of others?
Submitted
Submitting a manuscript isn’t hard. Upload a file, a few supporting documents, and call it a day. The trouble comes with managing our mind, our beliefs and habitual thoughts. “It isn’t ready,” we tell ourselves at the entrance of the pipeline. But that is the point. Submit to the process!
Under Review
An editor makes a decision. A desk reject or send out for review the editor selects external readers for their expertise, but their most desirable qualities are their willingness and availability to review the manuscript.
Once the readers return their reports and the editor makes a decision, joints welded together. Is the manuscript outright accepted or kindly rejected? Or is there another problem? A fatal flaw in the argument? A problem with its premise? Or does it just need more work?
Most often, the decision is a murky revise and resubmit. The editor returns the reader reports, occasionally prefacing those reports with comments. Sometimes the manuscript may be rejected because it is outside the scope of the publisher or journal.
Here is where the pipeline can break down. How do you respond to the reader reports? Are the suggestions feasible? Do you take the manuscript elsewhere or shelve it? This point is where the pipeline’s “sheer force and momentum” breaks down. Take too long, and you may find new editors have taken the helm or the journal or press has a different vision. Take too little time, and the revision may come across as inadequate, unworthy of readers’ efforts to assist it along to publication.
Here is where Gregg’s insight is useful. The trouble with the pipeline isn’t only about our relationship with the editor, the press, the readers. It’s also about our relationship with our work and ourselves. Like a clogged toilet, what we thought would be flushed away comes back up.
Accepted
Even when the review ends in acceptance, the pipeline hasn’t ended. Now it is now connected to other lines.
Under Contract
In the pipeline of publishing books, nothing seems more promising than a contract. Yet even contracts have various stages. Advance contracts lay out the interest of the press to move forward, but they aren’t binding. An advance contract is said to be binding when the press committee approves the project.
But even a binding contract does not yet mean in production. That stage occurs when the author turns in the finished draft, complete with the front matter—the table of contents and acknowledgments. Perhaps ownership is too strong a word, but it can feel as though our work is no longer our own.
In production
In this stage of the publishing pipeline, the publisher assumes control over the manuscript. The article or book goes to a copyeditor, whose job is not to elevate the prose but follow a stylesheet. The touch of copyeditors nowadays is light, and rigorous fact-checking, securing rights for images, and verifying sources is the author’s responsibility.
Just when you thought you were done, the manuscript comes back for approval. The copyeditor may have queries. They intervene at the sentence level with polite, “meaning retained?” Do you approve, reject, revise? Choose carefully!
Proofs gleam with authority because the manuscript appears as it will in print. But even they require final approval of the author and publisher. Our well-practiced thoughts disrupt the sheer force and momentum of the pipeline. Four weeks to review this. Ten days to check that. Each stage of review allotted a shorter and shorter increment of time. Our sentences, once so malleable, are now laid out on a page. Take out six words near the bottom of the page, then insert another three up above to preserve the page layout!
Forthcoming
Forthcoming projects the publication not just in the future. A specific volume and issue. A release date. January, I would learn, was simply the month the book was printed. It was not yet published. The publication would not arrive until in mid-February. Until then, the pipeline ended with a stack of books in a warehouse, awaiting a new pipeline for distribution.
