The Five and Unders
PW first inquired into the racial makeup of survey respondents 10 years ago. In 2013, 89% of the 630 respondents were white. By 2018, the share of white respondents had fallen to 80% and has hovered around that level ever since.
Publishing has been slow to diversify its workforce, but a generational shift seems to be underway. Among survey respondents who have been in the industry for five years or less—in other words, those who have come of age in publishing largely during the pandemic and in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder—only 64% identify as white. And while 77% of the younger respondents identify as female (compared to 79% of overall respondents), a smaller portion identifies as male (12%, vs. 17% overall) and a much larger share identifies as nonbinary (10%, vs. 4% overall).
Though newcomers to publishing are more diverse than their older counterparts, they are also more skeptical of the industry’s DEI efforts. Forty-two percent said that diversity programs have produced little noticeable results.
Responses to the survey also suggest that new industry members are still making up their minds about their future in publishing. Thirty-nine percent said they are very or extremely satisfied with their jobs, a much lower rate than among their older counterparts, but only 19% said they are not satisfied with their jobs at all, which is similar to the overall response. Forty-two percent said they are somewhat satisfied.
A small portion of younger employees, 12%, said they expect to leave the industry within the next two years, but 37% hope to be at higher positions at their current companies. Lack of advancement opportunities was second only to low salaries as the biggest source of dissatisfaction among this group.
2023 Median Compensation
Respondents from across the industry earned more on average in 2023 than in 2022. The median compensation, which includes base salary plus bonuses and commissions, rose 7.3% over 2022, to $75,000. That increase could be due in part to the success unions and other employee groups had in getting major New York publishers to raise entry-level pay beginning in 2022. Indeed, the share of respondents earning less than $50,000 per year fell to 12% in 2023, from 17% in 2022.
AI Rising
This year’s survey found a huge jump in the percentage of employees who said their companies are using AI: 53%, compared to 23% in 2022. But like everyone else, publishing employees are uneasy about the new technology. Only 25% of survey respondents believe AI will have a positive impact on their jobs, while 40% believe it will have a negative impact. Respondents were even more concerned about how AI will affect the industry in general: only 13% said they believe AI will change publishing for the better, while 56% think the technology will make it worse.
We asked respondents who are worried about the impact of AI on publishing to tell us their concerns. Here’s what some of them said.
“ I suspect poor use of AI by potential authors and quantity-over-quality publishers will further crowd the marketplace, making curation and promotion all the more essential. Though AI will have a positive effect of streamlining some work, it will create new work and skills in prompt engineering. In the short term, I think this will lead to greater confusion and noise. In the long term, I think it will make the role of the publisher and skilled publishing employees all the more essential and will become one more tool to be wielded—successfully or not.”
“ AI is being used as an excuse to undercut and undercompensate human workers, it can’t deliver on any of its promises, and it costs far more (in money and in energy) to operate than maintaining and appropriately compensating a human workforce would.”
“ Some publishers are already turning into book factories and book conveyor belts, and while it is understood that 80% of a publisher’s revenue will come from 20% of its product portfolio, it’s not fair to relegate the other 80% of products to AI-related processes. I can foresee smaller-name authors having a harder time than they already have coming into a publisher because their content might be seen as too expensive to publish when AI can produce something better for cheaper with 100% copyright and all other rights for the publisher.”
“ To put it bluntly, fuck AI. I’m sorry, but not really. We put out a job opening this year. The number of submissions we received that used generative content was appalling. I have genuine concern for the future of communication if this practice is allowed to proliferate unchecked. If you want to talk automation? I already automated things. We, collectively, have been able to virtually automate tasks for over a decade, you just needed a little know-how. But now all those automations get slapped with an AI label when it’s just, overall, a new update to existing code and programs to allow for user-generated prompts as an input over logic clauses. It’s inane. Meanwhile, the impact is felt most by small presses and literary journals who now have to hire people to check submissions for AI-generated content. The arts suffer, while tech bloats. I want no part of this technology in our ecosystem. Why even participate in the arts if a human did not have a hand in sourcing it?”
“ Until it is regulated, AI-created content will continue to flood the marketplace and AI companies will continue to use copyrighted materials to train their AI. We need to keep humans in the loop as the dominant creators of literature and nonfiction works. AI should be used only as a tool for the creation of long-form works, not the primary source of content.”
“ I see a renewed temptation to devalue the work of human creators because AI feels like an easy button solution to the hard work and complex economics of research, reporting, and creative expression.”
“ It feels like yet another shortcut publishers will take instead of compensating their workers well and giving them a viable career path.”
