Dbo: Reflections and Questions

After spending - I don't know - four or five weeks reading and discussing the publishing industry my perspective on the industry has almost completely shifted from the one I had at the beginning of the course. Before taking this class I knew next to nothing about the publishing industry before this class and was honestly, a pretty naive, optimistic, fiction writer. Now, though, I feel like the curtain has been pulled back, and I see the publishing industry with eyes less jaded. My previous blog post delves deeper into those reflections, but one question I am left with - the first one listed below - comes from this new perspective.

A Question We Probably Won't be Able to Answer: In today's class, Prof. Stockman made a point to emphasize how small literary communities are by showing us the authors and readers who likely have connections to Salamander's editors. Katie Sticca also mentioned that the AWP conference is a relatively small community. Somewhat related to that, in the introduction to What Editors Do, Peter Ginna mentioned the substantial lack of diversity in the publishing industry, and I haven't failed to notice that almost if not every editor we have spoken with or about has been white. These observations make me curious about how the American publishing industry might manifest its bias. After what I have learned from the first month-ish of this course, I am no longer naive enough to assume that the publishing industry is immune to bias, and I wonder how it plays out in the publishing world and how it may affect the books, articles, and poems we eventually get to read. I would be curious to hear non-white, insider perspectives on the industry.

A Couple Questions That I Probably Should Know the Answer to by Now: This might be my forgetful mind or just my wanting to revisit something we've already talked about, but I'm still curious about agents' role in the publishing industry. We talked about them towards the beginning of the course, and looking back - after having read Hothouse especially - I realize that I imagine agents' work being very similar to editors' work. So I suppose my questions are: What would a day in the life of an agent look like? How does it compare to an editors' average day? Do agents wear as many hats as editors? How involved are they after a book has been accepted by a publishing company? I'd also assume that agents are not usually one-person shows - that there are agencies that employ agents. Is that true? How do those companies work?

And My Last Question... what's next? We've already covered so much in this course that I am struggling to think of what we might discuss going forward. I suppose we still have an entire book to read and two-and-a-half months of course content... I guess I'm simply curious as I anticipate where we might go from here.