Zachary Pace on the Push and Pull of Working in Publishing as a Writer

From earliest memory, I knew that my aunt worked in book publishing. As an editor of children’s books at a large, corporate publisher, she would send me boxes upon boxes of cast-offs that she’d find around the office. Even before I had learned how to read, I would thumb through these books in my solitude—as the only child of an unhappy couple, left to entertain myself in our house in the woods on a hill, without neighbors or cable television, before video game consoles, computers, and the internet entered the home. My aunt was one of my first idols. She lived and worked in Manhattan—her apartment and office both crowded by long shelves and tall piles of books: books on every table, books under every table, books beside the bed, books on top of the bed. She’d even written the foreword to a leather-bound, gilt-edged, woodcut-illustrated edition of Wuthering Heights , which takes pride of place on my bookshelf to this day. Since infancy, I’ve looked to my aunt as the embodiment of urbane sophistication and literary savvy; instinctively, I attempted to emulate her. By the age of ten, I’d decided that someday I’d move to New York City—to edit books and to write my own. My aunt warned me that the path may be harrowing. Precocious and foolhardy, I convinced myself that I could do both. I moved to Brooklyn in 2008, at the dawn of the so-called Great Recession, which irrevocably strained, among so many aspects of American life, both the vitality of the publishing industry and the cost of New York City housing. For the next ten years, I’d work in entry-level positions at small, independent book publishers, while training in the art of making supplemental income—freelancing on the weekends, teaching English comp at night, selling my books to secondhand bookstores—in fact, when I was let go from a publishing position, I took the cardboard boxes of cast-offs that my aunt had sent to my office (instead of my apartment, where I didn’t have room for them), brought them in a taxi to the Strand, and […]

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