When you realize that part of the reason your salary is so low is because most of the other assistants have professor/executive/surgeon/famous artist parents to support them
(Submission from Anonymous, thanks!)
note: I have actually gotten a few submissions/notes along these lines. To be honest, this is not at all what I have observed in my own experience. I’ve only met one ‘trust fund kid’ in publishing and the rest are poor and making it on their own like me. *Shrug* I don’t particularly think the CEOs of our companies are keeping us under paid because they assume we have family money. I do think it’s possible that people from more affluent backgrounds migrate towards less practical and more creative careers because they have the freedom to do so. All that said, again, the vast majority of people I work with are scraping by but choose to stay in the job anyway.
The actual truth when a book gets no reviews
(Real Talk Rant from LifeNPublishing: The thing that really sucks about this situation is that this is the one thing you can never say to an author. An author will call and ream out their editor, publicist, anyone who will listen, about how everyone must be bad at their jobs. But the real truth is that their book is just fucking terrible. And despite that usually being the most obvious answer to anyone with a brain, that’s the one thing an author will never realize and the one thing we are never allowed to come out and say. So we lie and demure and coddle. But really: your book is bad and you should feel bad and it’s not your publisher’s fault.)
