Looking back, I really rolled the dice out on a limb with this project. I decided to write a story about a notoriously inaccessible industry based in a city 2,437 miles away from where I’d be conducting the majority of my research. I had one connection of a connection in a major publishing house, and I knew no professional authors or content creators.
So, all in all, not a great plan. But at the same time, it was also wonderful to finally learn how books are made. Before I reached out to anyone, I read two comprehensive books on the history of publishing to get some sense of how things worked and what kinds of questions I should ask to learn how things have changed. Along the way, I started watching a lot of book-related content on social media and sort of just stumbled across the people who would become the main characters of the story. That may have been my favorite part of the process because not only was I learning about publishing, but I was finding out that there were a whole community surrounding it. I went from wondering if there were any readers or writers online to being staggered by the sheer number of them. Then of course came the difficult part—asking them to talk to me.
I don’t care how many times I do it, sending someone an email that runs along the lines of “Hi there, would you mind if I borrowed an hour—I mean minute—of your time to ask you some questions? You see, I’m curious about this topic and I'm making that everybody’s problem,” is never going to be an easy thing for me to do, especially when the people I’m reaching out to are on the other side of the country or, in one or two cases for this story, the world. Let’s just say I made good use of the University’s most official signature and tried to appear as professional as I could.
I was honestly surprised when I got a few emails back from the content creators I’d reached out to. I don’t know why, but when someone appears in any form of media, I assume they’re going to be hard to contact. So imagine my astonishment when I heard back from some creators within a week of reaching out. Then I finally had to think about deciding what I was supposed to ask them.
Finding the right questions is always tricky for me, because to ask the right questions I need to understand the entire structure of the story that they’ll play into. Most of my drafts really begin when I schedule an interview and then think “Ok, now?”
Thinking up those questions helped me imagine what this story was going to be. I knew I wanted it to be a long-form feature, and I knew I wanted it to be centered on people, so in the end I came up with questions that ranged from personal to conceptual. They ranged from “Where did you grow up?” to “How do you think gender dynamics have shaped the online book community and the perception of the young adult genre?” and I thank my interviewees for putting up with them.
Next came the interviews, which were nerve-wracking but great. Yes, interviewees, your interviewer is just as afraid of you as you are of them. I think I was pretty stiff and stressed out during my first few interviews, but the conversations did become more natural when I eventually relaxed, and then I could just listen to the story of how someone came to be doing what they’re doing and ask their thoughts on the questions I’d been contemplating for months.
With the content creators’ interviews wrapped, I had to tackle the remaining (and not unsignificant) challenges of the story: connecting with publishing professionals and someone within TikTok itself and finding a concrete way to synthesize everything I’d learned into one cohesive narrative.
I’ll start with the publishing professionals because that was an easy if tedious solution. Like I said, most publishers live in New York and are hard to reach, so it was difficult to get in touch. In the end, I basically just surfed LinkedIn and reached out to as many Big Five employees as I could. Of the dozens I reached out to, only two got back to me. Thankfully, they were both extremely helpful, though they had to contend with corporate rules about talking to the press, which meant our conversations were a little more guarded than I’m used to.
TikTok turned out to be a bust. I couldn’t get in touch with anyone at the company, and their contact information either led me to wrong numbers or webpages without actual contact info. That’s why I decided to put TikTok HQ on the list of places I wanted to visit for the final leg of this story.
The final challenge was telling this story in an interesting way. I knew I wanted to use a first-person narrative, but how to illustrate the changing dynamics of the publishing in one short journey? I decided that I needed to get closer to the action, so I applied for a travel grant and got enough money to visit LA for a few days. I planned out my destinations, The Last Bookstore, a Barnes & Noble, and TikTok HQ among others. My advisor recommended that I leave ample room for improvisation and on-the-spot reporting, which was terrifying but ultimately the right call, as I found out when I finally arrived in LA.
Oh boy, the LA trip. I don’t know what about spending several days navigating LA traffic sounded fun to me, but I can promise you that the actual experience was not. The places themselves were fantastic. Aside from nerving myself to talk to employees and get bounced by security guards, I quite enjoyed the reporting process and learned quite a lot about responding to leads in the moment. More importantly, I got exactly the detail I needed to turn this maybe-definitely-sort-of-dense piece into something hopefully fun to read.
Then it was back to school and a flurry of frantic writing. I know I thanked my advisor in the acknowledgements section, but I’d like to thank her again here for her excellent edits and suggestions that really helped make this story what it is. And I’d also like to thank you for joining me for this little retrospective. I hope it’s shed some light on how this story was made. It’s certainly helped me think though what I might have done better. I can only hope that I’ll apply what I’ve learned to my next harebrained story idea.