Alexander-Julian Gibbson was the Stylist of the STRAWHAT Cast for OPLA Season 1 Promo

As a bookseller, I want you to know that one of the worst things about our industry is the unsettlingly pervasive idea that we should financially suffer for working in it. There is a powerful idea in creative fields (as in many, many fields under late capitalism) that one should be willing to forego necessities of life – namely, an adequate wage – in order to have work that one resonates with emotionally.

In bookworld, I’d say that this is frequently aided and abetted by two factors. First, we often feel a strong sense of community with our coworkers and the book creation/promotion world at large and feel we should sacrifice personally for them; that to do so is right. Second, we have a sense that, due to a confluence of factors  from Amazon monopolization to the rise of the Internet to the pandemic’s financial tolls, we work in a permanently struggling industry – that we should be willing to take the hit, as it were, to help keep our business afloat.

Neither of those feelings is accurate in an independent bookstore. It doesn’t matter how narrow the profit margins are or how close you are with your coworkers. Your labor is labor, and it must be compensated. They are even less true in the context of a multi-billion-dollar publishing corporation, where the people at the top (including the parent company’s owner, who is literally Rupert Murdoch) benefit from growing monopolization while employees are unable to afford basic cost-of-living expenses. May I remind you that of HarperCollins’ thousands of employees, many are required to live in New York City – one of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the world. While working long hours, HarperCollins staff making a starting salary (45,000/year) make $18,600 less than the average annual cost of living in New York City for a single person.

This is unacceptable. As one sign carried on the picket line read– PASSION DOESN’T PAY THE RENT.