I’m marching on a picket line outside the offices of HarperCollins, the publisher of this very book you’re now reading. It’s a gray and freezing day in Lower Manhattan, right near Wall Street, and every now and then an errant snowflake lands in my hair so that I feel foolish for not bringing a hat.

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Still, I carry my bulky sign—United Auto Workers on Strike!—and tell myself that if two hundred and fifty publishing workers can be out on the streets protesting all winter and forfeiting their already meager paychecks, then I, as a supportive author, can tolerate one hour in the cold.

It is December 16, 2022, and HarperCollins employees have been on strike for months now. Their demands are modest—a higher entry-level salary ($50,000 a year rather than $45,000, still peanuts for a job based in Manhattan in 2022) and more diversity in hiring—demands that a publisher owned by one of the world’s largest media conglomerates should easily be able to provide.

Yet management still refuses to come to the bargaining table. The situation is dire. There seems to be no end in sight, no limit to corporate greed. So why can’t I stop smiling?

*

The year is 2003, and I am wearing a brand-new dress, some rayon floral number that cost $14.99. I’ve just bought it off the sale rack at the H&M a block down from the Simon & Schuster office, after a run-in with a Xerox machine left my original outfit covered in black ink. A little bit of lipstick in the office bathroom, and I’m ready for happy hour.

It is December 16, 2022, and HarperCollins employees have been on strike for months now.

We meet at our favorite dive bar on the Lower East Side, nursing vodka sodas—two-for-one from 5–8 p.m.!—and digging into the free bowls of nut mix that could count as dinner if you eat every morsel and don’t mind having a few stomach issues after. We don’t mind. I, for one, have just spent my dinner money on the new dress.

I’m tired and headachy from working under fluorescent lights all day, but I rejoice in having finally regrouped with my people, a bunch of other assistants who also have big ambitions and very small bank balances. That they currently function more like a Greek chorus forecasting doom and sorrow rather than the modern-day Algonquin round table I always imagined is absolutely fine with me.

Scintillating dialogue can come later. For now, we’ll go around and try to one-up each other with horror stories from work. Note that I’ve changed names here to protect the innocent—and the underpaid.

“Michelle is trying to avoid an author of hers who is really, really needy,” sighs Maddie, a publicity assistant who started on the same day as I did. “So every time he calls I have to tell him she’s not available, and when I ask him if I can take a message, he starts telling me his life story.” Maddie makes the universal sign of the embattled assistant: elbows on the table, hands rubbing her temples. “Apparently his wife is leaving him, and his cat has a urinary tract infection.”

“I walked in on Emily breast-pumping in her office,” says Kevin, token male assistant friend. “I was so embarrassed, but I didn’t want her to feel embarrassed, so I stayed and tried to make conversation?”

Poor Kevin, reminding us that men, too, are sometimes susceptible to upspeak. “I don’t think she took it that well because she dropped a whole bottle of breast milk on the ground and screamed. I ran out and slammed the door, and I think we’ve mutually decided to pretend like it never happened.”

“This morning, Frank told me to go to the bodega and buy him animal crackers before our 10:30 marketing meeting,” Amy started, fluffing up her bangs. “They were out of the regular kind, so I took a risk and bought the chocolate-flavored ones. He screamed at me when I got back. Told me I don’t follow directions well.” She takes a long swig of her well whiskey and Coke and belches.

“Last night I had to stay at the office until nine, trying to put together photo credits for this enormous history book that’s coming out this fall,” I say, gulping my drink; already, we’ve forgotten that we’re supposed to be making them last. “I mean, I had no other plans, but the boss lady didn’t know that.”

We’re doing a cute little bit—”Fresh-faced college grads find out that work is hard”—editing out the egg Maddie had to donate in order to pay rent. The fact that Lisa couldn’t make it out tonight because she’d had to give up her room in her Brooklyn apartment and is instead commuting ninety minutes on New Jersey Transit to make it back to her parents’ house at the end of the workday.

There is certainly no mention of Audrey, a quiet yet quick-witted Black woman who lasted one year as an assistant before moving on to get her teaching degree.

I’m just about to make my way to the bar, flashing a $5 bill so the bartender knows I mean business, when I hear Amy say, “This is so not fair. We shouldn’t stand for this.”

“We should unionize,” says Maddie.

I roll my eyes and make a jack-off motion with my hand. I’m so eloquent.

“What are we, longshoremen who want to do some racketeering by the pier?” I scoff.

Simon & Schuster is not the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, after all. We are not Sally Field, standing on that table in that one movie. We knew what we were getting into when we went into this business, and we did it anyway.

I squeeze some lime into my vodka soda (vitamins!) and feel a little sorry for Maddie, so deluded in her idealism that she thinks this is how the world works. I myself am not so naïve. The labor movement is not meant for aspiring white-collar people like us.

*

Very few people get into book publishing because they want to get rich. They do it for the privilege of working around books.

When I started out as an editorial assistant in 2001, I knew that I would be subjected to years of dues-paying. I was told again and again that there was no way to learn about the industry without sitting in the middle of it (at the bottom, of course) and observing, by doing secretarial work and watching more experienced editors make all the decisions, with the goal of becoming one of those editors someday.

The thrill of knowing that I was on the path to putting wonderful new books into the world was enough to sustain me, and I held out hope that if I can stick it out long enough I might even begin to earn a livable wage.

Over the course of my editorial career, I began to realize that publishing had very little to do with what I liked to read or introducing great literature to a wide audience. Only sometimes was the job about putting books out into the world that I—or anyone at the company—actually believed in. Very few of the books I felt passionately about were likely to garner any significant sales. (These are the art-versus-commerce blues that just about every bright-eyed young go-getter in a creative industry gets to experience.)

So instead, I worked on business books and self-help books, diet books and ghostwritten celebrity memoirs, anything that had a fighting chance of hitting the New York Times Best Sellers list. I worked on the books that my bosses chose to work on, or books that their bosses chose for them to work on. My input on the whole process counted for very little, of course. I was meant to be occupied with other things.

My life as an assistant in the early aughts can be characterized as a constant battle with paper. I sent faxes. I chased down confirmation sheets for those faxes and stuck them into my boss’s plastic inbox trays. I filed. I got down on my hands and knees to squeeze stacks of paper into cabinets that were already overflowing with contracts and author photos. I took phone messages.

I wrote them on triplicate paper, so my boss could have one copy and I could also keep a record for lord knows why. I opened mail. I shuttled interoffice envelopes from floor to floor. I put proposals sent by literary agents in my boss’s inbox and kept unsolicited manuscripts to respond to myself. I photocopied. I made twelve copies of a four-hundred-page manuscript so that everyone on the editorial team could weigh in and ended up with a backache.

I tried to clear the jams in the photocopier, but sometimes the Xerox machine would reject my most earnest attempts at paper management, and I’d have to buy a new dress at H&M. And all these paper cuts, all of this agita, would one day lead to the creation of an actual $24.95 hardcover that people might buy.

In my off hours I read books about the golden era of publishing, memoirs by legendary editors who seemed to have lived like rock stars, all artistry and excess. Older colleagues told me wistfully about the days when they could smoke in their offices, Mad Men-style, while their secretaries ran personal errands for them.

There were the much-glorified three-martini lunches with brilliant authors, followed by postlunch naps on their office floors, and the freedom to publish whomever and whatever they pleased, with no numbers guy constantly worrying them about the bottom line. Just about everyone who worked in publishing at the time was independently wealthy, so they’d been free to ignore those pesky numbers.

Corporations were ruining the book business, with budgets slashed and art being turned so blatantly into commerce. The gentlemen’s agreements of the past were being supplanted by legalese and digital marketing teams. To the old guard, this was downright vulgar. I couldn’t help but agree.

Publishing workers like me were caught in the middle, weighed down by corporate bullshit (less flexibility, more paperwork, always the eye on the bottom line) but still burdened by the elitism of the past.

The industry I inherited was mired in the muck, somewhere between the worst of the so-called good old days, when rich white men ran everything according to their own whims, and the contemporary shift to corporate publishing, in which (mostly) rich white men ran everything according to the whims of their company’s executive board and shareholders.

Publishing workers like me were caught in the middle, weighed down by corporate bullshit (less flexibility, more paperwork, always the eye on the bottom line) but still burdened by the elitism of the past. Even by the time my career had begun, the problems of the past still plagued us.

The publishing industry screeched to a halt every August as bosses escaped to their vacation homes while assistants were left behind in the city to fret about making rent on a room in an apartment shared with three roommates. Unbridled misogyny still meant that sexual harassment was a rite of passage for generations of assistants. Getting a job in the first place was still about where you went to college or who you knew, which meant that diversity of race and socioeconomic class and educational background was hardly a consideration.

“This is just how it is” is the common refrain of institutions that don’t want to even consider change. For most of the early aughts, I sat dutifully in editorial meetings, taking notes and keeping quiet. The rules, spoken and otherwise, said that junior staff were there only to listen, with the hope that the wisdom of their elders would trickle down to them slowly but steadily, like how Reaganomics was supposed to work.

Later, in 2014, I worked at a digital start-up where twenty-four-year-olds ran the meetings, and other twenty-four-year-old colleagues expressed their opinions with abandon. The culture shock was disorienting. I couldn’t believe that young staffers were being treated like estimable people with valid concerns right away. My years in publishing had trained me to believe that personhood would have to be earned, like a gold star or a promotion, which was more likely just a title change with no raise.

In 2007, I was promoted to associate editor, and I began to think that all my dues-paying might finally pay off. One more promotion, and I wouldn’t have to assist a senior editor any longer, would get to work on my own books and maybe even get my own office. Instead, I got laid off when my imprint folded four months into my new role. I found out the hard way that the only thing hard work guarantees is unpaid overtime.

We were told to see all the indignities and abuse, making what often averaged out to be less than minimum wage, as a fun challenge, an experience upon which we’d lovingly look back to feel proud of how much our skin had thickened, the fact that we’d survived. We were meant to be satisfied with being told, “That’s just how it is.” This was how things in this industry had always worked, they said, and would continue to work, over and over and over again. I believed them.

*

When I sold this book to an imprint of HarperCollins, I knew I would have to do some cognitive acrobatics. Very few book publishers—even the smallest ones—are entirely pure. Even self-publishing is almost entirely dependent on Amazon, the company whose labor practices don’t allow for warehouse workers to take proper bathroom breaks.

But HarperCollins is owned by News Corp and is therefore particularly noxious, aligned as they are with the Fox News propaganda machine. And so it is that noted book-banner Ron DeSantis and I share the same publisher.

I’m ashamed to tell you how long it took me to realize that just because a book is categorized as nonfiction, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true. “Nonfiction” is just a marketing term for a book in which the author(s) purports to be telling the truth. Fact-checking, I learned, is the legal and financial responsibility of the author rather than the publisher (many thanks to Joanna Arcieri, who fact-checked this book).

“The responsibility for the accuracy of the text does rest on the author; we do rely on their expertise or research for accuracy,” a spokesperson for Hachette Book Group told Esquire in 2020. Each and every publisher that constitutes the Big Five largest companies in corporate book publishing has a similar policy, one that provides authors only a legal read of soon-to-be-published books (hi to the HarperCollins attorney who reviewed this manuscript) rather than thorough fact-checking.

As you might imagine, some authors are more invested in getting the facts right than others, which is why misinformation runs rampant in so many books that purport to be true. My book proposal included this chapter you’re reading now, in which I call out HarperCollins in particular for being complicit in the spread of disinformation, but the good people at Ecco bought the book anyway.

Even in my most bright-eyed, head-down days, when I really believed that literature could change the world, there were books that just felt wrong, books that seemed to make the world a little worse simply by existing. Rush Limbaugh’s smug face sneered at me from the covers of bestselling hate bombs, while Glenn Beck’s “global warming is a hoax” book and Michelle Malkin’s anti-immigrant screeds sat on the free shelf right next to Ernest Hemingway and Edith Wharton reissues.

Drilled into me back then was the belief that putting out big bestsellers, no matter the style or substance, would always be a net positive. Any lies that Oprah-endorsed quacks (yes, I did briefly work on a Dr. Oz book) presented as research-driven fact were acceptable because the profits from such books might enable me to acquire the kind of fiction I actually liked to read.

The homophobic rants of Fox News personalities had a built-in audience, so their guaranteed sales just might allow me to take a chance on a debut story collection from an unknown queer writer. Extremism and hatred and fake science and conspiracy theories sold books, and the spoils of those books would allow new literary voices to emerge.

Publishing a diversity of opinions is paramount, or so my elders in the book publishing industry have repeatedly told me. Even though they are corporate entities, publishers see themselves as arbiters of free speech, fighting the good fight to make sure a variety of voices—both sides, if you will—can be heard.

Under this logic they are able to convince themselves that publishing hatemongers and charlatans is downright noble, even if—especially if—their ideas make you uncomfortable. They could not imagine such ideas could ever cause harm greater than their own discomfort.

Even at my most naïve, it had always seemed to me that the Founding Fathers never granted anyone the inalienable right to receive big advances and bigger marketing budgets from large publishing conglomerates for their abhorrent opinions, but what did I know?

I didn’t really have to reckon with the book publishing world’s complicity in spreading hate and lies at the time. Even though I was battling printers during the day and eating bar nuts for dinner, I was still lucky, so lucky that the content of hateful books produced by the industry in which I was complicit didn’t directly impact my life. So it was easy to keep focus on the daily drudgery and not big-picture concerns.

Then Trump was elected. Then children were separated from their families at the southern border. Then over a million Americans died in a global pandemic, then Roe v. Wade was overturned, then there was a massive uptick in books being banned in school libraries.

I watched the dehumanization of trans people become a right-wing talking point that was then often validated by centrist Democrats. Every single day I would scroll through Twitter and find some new devastating consequence to, among other things, publishers’ role in elevating bigots.

At the same time, companies large and small started promising to make structural changes in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, and publishers, whose staff tends to be more homogenous than not (in 2019 the book publishing industry was seventy-six percent white), saw antiracist books become a profitable new trend. I watched from afar as publishers put out statements about equality and announced the creation of DEI committees, taking the smallest first steps in trying to increase diversity among its workers.

Publishers even began to imply that they might value the diversity of their employees’ opinions as much as they have traditionally valued their authors. Imagine! Next thing you know, some twenty-three-year-old is going to walk into an editorial board meeting with well-thought-out  criticism and the other people at the table will listen to it!

It’s helpful for me to think of the choice to publish people who encourage the marginalization of others as an issue of workers’ rights rather than freedom of speech. I’m no constitutional scholar, but I know that the people who actually make the book, who do battle with paper (there’s less paper now, but still), should have a say in what books they work on. Making a barely livable salary while clearing Xerox jams to get out the message of one’s oppressors is a step too far.

So I cheered when underpaid employees protested Simon & Schuster’s signing of notorious homophobe Mike Pence for a two-book deal for at least $3 million in 2021. And I signed an open letter in support of Penguin Random House employees in 2022, when an imprint of PRH gave Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett a whopping $2 million book deal to write a memoir just as she’d been critical in the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

There are many other examples I won’t go into now, other than to say that it gives me hope every time employees come together to speak out. Such collective action might not work every time (it didn’t, in the latter two cases), but it is so much more than I could ever have envisioned in the days when I was charging groceries on my credit card and shuttling paper around my office. Everyone should have a union, and that includes publishing workers.

*

There’s one thing about HarperCollins that puts it a step above all the rest of the Big Five publishers: it is, currently, the only one that has a union. The workers at HarperCollins have been unionized for decades, and for the past thirty years have been Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers (turns out the UAW organizes way more than the auto industry; Local 2110’s initiative to organize white-collar workers has resulted in its representation of a variety of cultural institutions from the Whitney Museum to Film at Lincoln Center).

When I myself was still a wrung-out assistant, a peon of the publishing industry, I knew the HarperCollins union existed, but I couldn’t imagine all the possibilities it represented. But in the days post-Covid-lockdown, while I was beginning to work on this very book, I started to hear grumblings. Social media amplified them, turned them into a roar.

The labor movement had gotten a much-needed refresh in 2021, with workers from a vast array of fields beginning to organize, from retail workers to instructors at colleges across the country. Kim Kelly, author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, remarked on the sea change in a 2022 interview with Vogue.

“We saw and are continuing to see,” said Kelly, “workers at Amazon and Starbucks—these incredibly well-known corporations that I think a lot of people have accepted as being part of the fabric of their daily lives—go up against the bosses and say, ‘We need more from you, because you are literally hanging out in space while we’re trying to pay our rent.’”

All across the book industry, people watched as the staff at various other media companies and magazines unionized, analogous creative industries that had similarly treated employees like they should feel lucky just to be there. Creative types were not so different from the baristas and warehouse workers in their desire to be treated fairly. Solidarity across all industries, among all types of workers, began to feel like the only way to get a better deal for all. We were on the same team.

Then, for the first time in ages, the union at HarperCollins began bargaining for a better contract. Even better, many HarperCollins employees who were too high-level to join the union also vocally supported the effort. (But not all; I’m a petty bitch, so I absolutely took note of all the scuttlebutt about holdouts.)

It took many more years than I’d like to admit before I realized that if publishing is simply a corporate business, and profit its main goal, then all employees of the company should earn a living wage. I know, revolutionary! But for too long I didn’t understand that I was a worker, not just a kid with big dreams who was lucky to be there in the first place. That treating workers with basic dignity is good for everyone at the company.

Such support was echoed in wide-ranging media coverage that highlighted the union’s very modest demands. I knew the workers at HarperCollins had hit a nerve when people outside the book business began to ask me about the strike.

So here I am now, a HarperCollins author, demonstrating solidarity with the workers agitating for change. I’m one of many stomping along the sidewalk in a long and narrow oval outside the publisher’s office, mid-December mixed precipitation plunking down on us.

I enjoy watching the handmade signs go by. Passion Doesn’t Pay the Bills, one says, and If Black Lives Really Mattered They’d Pay Us a Living Wage. Then there are the more whimsical but still righteously angry book-themed signs, which I particularly admire: Where the Wild Things Are Underpaid and A Series of Unfortunate Salaries.

Twenty years after I myself was a peon of the publishing industry, I am able to access the anger I’d felt back then and use it, I hope, for good. Better late than never. Chants of “What do we want? A CONTRACT! When do we want it? NOW!” feel like music to my ears, and when I get home, my voice will be as creaky as that one time when I went to private room karaoke with a few friends for five whole hours after a messy breakup. Catharsis!

It’s galvanizing to realize that I’m standing in a crowd of people who are energized and ready to say that conditions that I thought were entrenched and unchangeable are actually unacceptable. These workers believe that change can happen, and that it should happen; “this is just how it is” is no longer acceptable. Books matter, yes. Now more than ever. But book workers matter, too.

By the time the strike ends, sixty-six days after it first began, HarperCollins will agree to move the starting salary of $45,000 to $47,500, with $50,000 becoming the base by 2025. Such gains might feel meager after a fight so long and messy, but around the same time, the other Big Five publishers will also increase their threshold for entry-level salaries. This feels like a solid victory in a battle that I never even thought could be waged.

It’s galvanizing to realize that I’m standing in a crowd of people who are energized and ready to say that conditions that I thought were entrenched and unchangeable are actually unacceptable.

Still, there is so much more work to do. There will likely still be many naïve little ambition monsters like myself who arrive at an office and are stripped of many of their illusions about what work is, but I still maintain a ray of hope that some cycles can be broken.

There are certain things that we just shouldn’t tolerate anymore.

______________________________

From I Want to Burn This Place Down by Maris Kreizman. Copyright © 2025 by Maris Kreizman. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.