The Steve Laube Agency

I have a lot of pet peeves. So many that this is the second time I’ve written about them. The first was three and a half years ago, when I vented about a host of things. Click here.

I am not finished.

Other peeves involve people who don’t wait for their turn. Like those who drive on the shoulder of the road to bypass traffic or those who try to get on the plane before their group is called.

Another would be towns that allow trees and bushes to grow over road signs without trimming them, so a stop sign turns into a deadly game of Russian roulette, guessing whether cross traffic will stop, or not.

Major League Baseball eliminated several of my baseball “peeves” by adding the pitch clock, limiting throws to first base by the pitcher, and the thing no one misses: unlimited mound visits.

Dramatic overstatements bug me, like when someone refers to a book that sold three million copies last year and 500,000 this year, meaning “no one buys it anymore.”

I’ve received no counseling because pet peeves have become a hobby. A twisted hobby, but a hobby, nevertheless. Some people are into gardening, but I am into pet peeves.

One thing I really hate are “excerpted” graphs, where the vertical Y-axis is set to a narrow range of numbers to dramatize what otherwise is not dramatic at all. A relatively small daily temperature variance over a week in a simple line graph can make it seem as if the end of the world is near. The same works for the stock market, where we zoom in on one small piece of data.

Zoom out, and it is not worth the effort to give it any attention. Social media has trained us to inject drama into everything, even where none exists.

Book publishing makes sense only when viewed over a long period, from various perspectives and altitudes.

No one reads anymore, except for the hundred million people who do. Traditional publishers are not acquiring good books anymore, except for the hundreds of thousands they do acquire each year.

The one thing that never changes in book publishing is the time it takes to write, to build an audience interested in your work, and to make it all work well. Things are measured in years, so if you are in a hurry, you’d better think of a different way to communicate what is on your mind. Book publishing is a “zoomed out” industry where daily ups and downs have little influence on the big picture.

An individual publisher might have dozens, or even hundreds, of new books at various stages of publication at one time. For an author, one week of ups and downs with their manuscript might seem like a nerve-wracking experience; but zoom out, and it’s just another week for the publisher in what is a multiyear process.

In fact, you could apply a “zoomed-out” perspective to all of life, where big truths are omnipresent, regardless of whether you have a good or bad week.

Just don’t get me started on bicyclists and traffic laws.

 

Leave a Comment