PW's 50 under 40

One of the interesting points from Karl Pohrt’s speech is his allusion to the difficulties of getting young people into the book business.

As everyone probably knows, working in the book business (as a bookseller, reviewer, mid-list author, editor, etc.) isn’t quite as lucrative as, say, investment banking. Nevertheless, there are a lot of young people interested in the perceived glamour of publishing. I don’t know if it’s the intellectual stimulation of sales conferences and marketing meetings, or the massive piles of slush that arrive daily, but it’s not hard to find people looking to break into publishing.

Finding talented, good people who want to stay is a different matter . . .

Which is why I think Publishers Weekly‘s new year-long series featuring 50 exciting people in the industry under the age of 40 is so fantastic.

The first person featured is Emily Cook from Milkweed, who, at the age of 23, was hired to run the programming for Chicago’s Printer’s Row Book Fair. For the past three years she’s been at Milkweed as the Marketing Director, where her top concern is with getting more people to read:

Cook is adamant that, in an era when print media continues to cut back on book coverage, publishers must focus on figuring out how to convince more people to read, in order to arrest the downward spiral of people reading for pleasure.

“You want to publish a good book. But if nobody responds to it, you don’t have much of a book culture,” Cook declares. “It’s up to my generation of publishing professionals to figure out how we’re going to capture readers.

Personally, my favorite part of this piece is Emily’s dream job: “To be the next Nancy Pearl, complete with action figure.”