EDITH

I’m not resisting the temptation to reference Joan Didion, though it’s been a while since I’ve read her, and I’ve not yet followed through on my resolution from earlier this week to reread some bell hooks. But here‘s a link to “On Self-Respect” as originally published (under a different title) in Vogue in 1961, with this editorial comment added by anonymous Vogue staffer:

Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.

I hope that inspires you as it did me. And here’s a Didion paragraph that gets me every time—and I’ve read it dozens of times—with apologies for the retro language about Native Americans (which refers back to a historical diary account she related earlier in the piece). Apropos self-respect, Didion writes:

Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

Here at EDITH we’re fully embracing the risk. Actually that’s not exactly true: the bigger gamble would have been not building EDITH at all.

Anyhow, on to quick items:

• Our new project manager is asking us what big feature developments we’ll prioritize in Q1. Voucherify integration is near the top of our list. 
• If you want to check out the social reading and book discovery app Literal, still closed to the general public, I’ve three invite codes to give away. Just write to partners@tryedith.co and request one.
• In January we’ll gather a small group of deep thinkers interested in helping us define the EDITH service offerings on the coaching <-> therapy spectrum, referenced in updates v5 and v6, for an hour or two on Google Meet. Please stay tuned. We have some time-zone challenges to contend with when scheduling, which is a nice problem to have.
• Image below from Wunderzeichenbuch (Book of Miracles), c. 1552, recently brought online by the David Zwirner gallery, which incidentally is also a lovely small publisher.

Lastly, a big thank you for being on this venture with us. We’re grateful and excited for 2022. Wishing a Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and a shiny Happy New Year to all. 

To receive these updates via email, please write to megan@tryedith.co and ask to be added to our newsletter list.

It’s been a busy month! And if you follow tech or business news, you undoubtedly saw a lot of commentary on Facebook’s rebranding as Meta and pivoting to virtual reality. For some observers it conjured up queasy-making questions of “what data they might be able [to] sell now they can see not only your social network, but also the contents of your home.” I haven’t logged onto Facebook in years, so won’t have to change my habits to accommodate (or foil) their plans. But speaking as just a person in the world? I believe it’s objectively bad news. We should not cede more space—real or virtual—to Big Tech.

However, the reports did strengthen my conviction that as creative people who are deeply invested not only in making things, but also in supporting other people who make things, we need to band together and build structures and platforms that serve our interests. We can’t let Amazon’s K.D.P. suck up people’s intellectual property at rock-bottom prices simply because they can, and will continue to do so until advances in artificial intelligence let them get rid of human authors the way they’re aiming to get rid of traditional publishers. 

Here’s the thing: As editors and other book professionals, the value we add is not solely, or even primarily (in my view), in the output we help generate—a better book, a more beautiful package. It is in the relationships we develop with clients, our care, our linking arms with them as they struggle through the act of creation. EDITH is ostensibly a publishing services marketplace, and that’s how we’ll publicly be known, but in my mind we’re really about people, and connecting people who have skills with those who want them—and letting that collaboration transport people into whatever realms, intellectual, geographic, or otherwise, they wish to go. We’re going to be a small but highly visible part of a more globally distributed, disaggregated book industry that operates without middlemen, that restores creative collaboration and community to the center of the action.

You know the nature of EDITH’s business and, while we’re on the subject of Facebook/Meta, selling your data isn’t our business. What you enter in your profile and on your listing page—that’s all we need or wish to know. If that ever changes, you’ll be the first to hear about it.

Now some quick updates: 

• The Payment settings tab in the listing wizard is done. No more unhappy Stripe surprises.
• Switching “Therapy” to “Coaching” spectrum is underway, as half-measure before expanding that service sector even further.
• Via our connection to the House of Beautiful Business, we contributed ideas inspired by our developmental editing work to a podcast episode produced in collaboration with Salesforce. You can listen here to insights from Esther Blázquez Blanco, Fred Dust, Aditi Khorana, and Lindsey Wehking, narrated by me, Megan Hustad, with music by Mark Aanderud.
• If you want to discuss your profile or anything else EDITH-related with me, you can now click the link in my signature below and schedule a conversation.
• We have a new project manager on the tech side! Stay tuned for more features updates.
• Our image below comes from art created for the aforementioned podcast by the wonderfully talented graphic designer Holly King.

Last but not least, please complete a listing page and consider being aggressive with your pricing. You’re worth it!

First of all, big thanks to everyone who has been keeping up with us since v1. And to those of you who have replied to these updates, I want to give you a bear hug.

This week’s grab bag:

• Some tiny improvements to the listing wizard went live this week. It looks sharper. 
• We are working on text to help those new to publishing processes think about what array of services might best fit their needs—essentially a “potential pathways through EDITH” page. Lynn, one of my first clients as an independent editor, was one of the first people to look at EDITH after launching, and this was her comment: “I very much like the tone of it, but what I think is needed is an intro to the process of publication—including marketing. I think there needs to be a greater assumption of ignorance and need for a greater degree of laying down of the predicates to be addressed in the presentation of a ‘good book.’” (She is in her mid-80s and does not mess around.) We agreed she had a point. Then when Shannon Mullen O’Keefe had much the same reaction as Lynn, we knew we had to make it a priority. The moral of this story is that if you see something on EDITH that doesn’t sit well with you, say something.
• In the news: The New York Public Library has forgiven all late fines and ended the practice of charging fines altogether. Read more here.  
• “The Nerdletter” produced by Hell Yeah, Bookkeeping, a Los Angeles accounting firm that works primarily with creative people and agencies, is nicely done. It’s written and produced by company founder Paco de Leon, who approaches finances in ways friendly to those who don’t relish thinking about money or finances. More on her team here. They have Spotify playlists. 
• Speaking of money, we need to add a Payment Settings section to the listing wizard. That should happen before the gift-card integration mentioned in our last issue.
• We are gearing up for a big getting-the-word-out-about-EDITH push. Please let us know if you want to get involved. 
• And finally, here’s the “therapy” to “coaching” spectrum, from the pit to the YAY, as helpfully illustrated by friend of EDITH Lior Locher:

More on this front soon. Thanks for reading.

Biweekly newsletter number four! In the past two weeks we had our first user from Warsaw, Poland, which is exciting. Then after much back-and-forth with one user in Stellenbosch, South Africa, we finally determined her profile couldn’t be published because Stripe, our payments processor, is not yet available there. Here’s hoping it’s soon on the way. We also coincidentally heard from someone from Stripe Press, their publishing arm, and very much worth checking out.

We also talked to a coach in Brighton, England, who is a licensed psychotherapist (in Germany) and it was one of those great conversations that slashed through mental knots with a surprising economy of effort. The gist was that she believed, rightly so, that we’d been looking at a problem too narrowly—and the best solution had a wider scope than we’d been considering. All this to say: We will change the name of the “Therapy” service category, but it’s not a matter of switching it to “Coaching,” because many people will assume we’re talking about writing coaching, and what we’re aiming at is something deeper, something that could speak to the person making the book as a thinking, feeling, sometimes hurting person, not just as craftsperson, professional, or artist.

By way of illustration: When I handed in the manuscript of my last book to my publisher, and was semi-enjoying those months of waiting for editor’s comments and page proofs, my publisher wanted to talk about publicity and social media strategy, and I wasn’t ready for it. I needed to have a conversation far further upstream. I needed to have roughly five conversations about other matters before I could talk about self-promotion. But those aren’t conversations you can easily have with your publisher. They literally don’t have time for it. So my thinking with EDITH was that we needed to make it OK for an author not to be totally together, poised to conquer the world. We should acknowledge that not everyone comes to the point of publication with the support they need, and sometimes their need has more to do with mental or emotional health than with financial resources or having enough hours in the day in which to tweet effectively. 

In other EDITH news:

• We are making small improvements to the listing wizard. It’s incredible the number of tiny things that have to go right for a web page not to look a bit “off.” Just so, so many. But we’re getting there.
• A few of you have questions about pricing, which underscores the need to revamp the How It Works and About pages, and perhaps add another. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while, and your suggestions are most welcome. Just a reminder here that the EDITH commission fee is 6% as opposed to the 10% and even 20% seen elsewhere.
• The project manager on our technical team, Kate, is leaving us to work on sites built on the WordPress “tech stack” (this is developer-speak for “you don’t know what I’m talking about”). We’ll miss her but have confidence we’ll cross paths again.
• On the horizon: gift-card integration. Would it be fun to receive, say, a book cover design as a present? It’s one way to sidestep the supply chain breakdown we’ve been promised in time for the holidays.

Mood around the office lately:

Thanks for reading, and please be in touch with any questions or concerns. If some aspect of EDITH is not working for you, let us know. If there’s a feature you want to see, let us know that also.