Do Books Need End Credits?
There’s a growing movement inside publishing to add a credits page to the back of books. Functionally this would look like film credits: the director, followed by the lead actors, followed by everyone else who worked on the film (set designer, guy in café #2, assistant to the 3rd film grip, etc.). The idea of a credits page in publishing started as an effort to recognizing the many production, publicity, and marketing people — and, let’s be honest, their assistants — who contribute making a book happen but aren’t typically thanked or credited as a matter of course in the actual printed pages.
Former book editor turned author Maris Kreizman has a good piece that lays out the reasoning in favor of this expanded credits page. Adding a credits page, so the argument goes, acknowledges those who usually go unacknowledged in the low-wage, lots-of-work, little-thanks jobs of publishing (which can equally serve as a good base description of any work done in and around the arts). It’s a pro-labor reasoning that is an offshoot of trying to change many of publishing’s old ways, seemingly going hand-in-hand with trying to make the business more inclusive and operate in a different way than the old-money generations did.
The Real Nature of “Credit”
What proponents of the credit page often miss is that the nature of credit in publishing is more elusive than simply creating a long list of contributor names. Beyond showing your family or friends your name in a book — an admittedly cool but somewhat fleeting thrill — getting credit in this way often doesn’t lead to any tangible benefit. It’s natural to believe that, like extra credit in school elevates your grade, a shoutout in an important book will lead to more opportunity, recognition, or money. In practice, nominal credit in publishing and in many other areas, is an expression of power and not a transfer of it. Elon Musk has an army of engineers that launch rockets into space and create new electronic car technologies, but while their names may be credited on the patents, no one in the wide world is digging up their names and praising them as geniuses or writing biographies about them. Those engineers can’t go raise billions of dollars from investors even though they were arguably far more important to the tangible success of SpaceX or Tesla. Writ large in our economy the people at the top of an organization tend to accumulate the benefits of success no matter who gets credit on paper, and that’s no different in publishing.
My guess is that many proponents of the credit page would soon find that when implemented a credits page is a cosmetic symbol and not actually a remedy to the underlying issues of who and how much the people doing the labor are being rewarded for their work both socially and financially. This is not to mention that on a practical level all of the work done in implementing and maintaining a credits page will fall on the people who are fighting to be acknowledged in the first place. There is also the thorny question of whether or not you want your name printed in ink in every book that you work on. The rub? The less power you have the less of a choice you have on what you work on. Finally, where does credit page end? With the white-collar contributors? With the people in the warehouses? But not the booksellers or delivery drivers who put books into the hands of readers? While these knee-jerk objections all have run through my mind during this debate, the main argument against credit pages has to do with the relationship between an author and publisher rather than anything to do with practicality.
The Magic of a Book
Typically, the people who help publish an author’s work are thanked in the “acknowledgments” section. This is written by the author and typically includes the people they interact most with in the process (their agent, their editor, their publisher, their publicist, etc.). A book’s acknowledgements changed my life and nonetheless, I’m— against my own personal interests and experience — somewhat weary of them on a gut level. As with book credits, having pages and pages of acknowledgements — as has become the norm in the last decade — can ruin the magic that a book offers to the reader. Often with a good book you’ll forget about the author while you read it. Similarly, a reader should put down a great book with the feeling that they’ll follow the writer anywhere in the future. Their first thought shouldn’t be the same one that the people who work in the business are often plagued by: who edited and published this?
This is, admittedly, an old-school approach, but one that shouldn’t be dismissed as merely being regressive. Authors are ultimately the ones who do the vast majority of work and deserve the vast majority of the credit in all forms. Even though editors, for instance, are often the primary stakeholder at a book publisher, they are still by far a distant secondary factor in a book’s success. In endlessly debating who gets credit for what on the publishing side we risk transference, eventually losing sight of what we are there to do, which is make the author and their work shine and connect readers with books they feel passionate about. Our jobs function best when there’s a certain amount of humility involved and the work is done not with the end goal of public recognition in mind.
This is not to say the work people at a publishing house do shouldn’t be valued, especially by their peers, bosses, and the authors themselves. But the antidote to the problems a credit page tries to address is a fairer, merit-based system in which people are rewarded when they do something well. As with other arts — like film — it’s not credits that should ever be seen as markers of success (a full IMDB page does not tell you who was responsible for making good movies), it is sustained excellence, which is less manipulated by the whims of arbitrary favoritism. Credit is short term nod while real reputation comes from a high-quality output, over time. The solution may not be more outward facing credits but less. A system that focuses on rewarding who contributes by way of respect, pay, advancement, and a personal, genuine thanks rather than credit.