u/libralibrarylover

Hi, I never worked in publishing before but last year I got interviews with HarperCollins and PRH. The roles were not in publishing itself. I did not get either roles but now I work somewhere that is not entirely fulfilling. I wanted to try applying again for non-publishing roles at publishing companies so I have two main questions:

- for non-publishing roles, does hr/hiring managers/recruiters actually care if you demonstrate interest in publishing? For both my previous interviews, i acknowledged that I had no experience in publishing (duh I was 21, and I still don’t).

- is it possible to negotiate my salary? In New York, the salaries are incredibly low for everyone, but if I were to negotiate 65k to 68k, would it be doable?

Gonna have YouTube premium for just one month, maybe more if I like it

Now that all those stupid ads are out of the way, what should I binge watch?

I just finished Ways of Seeing by John Berger and I only understood like 10% of it. I don’t usually read essays, I’m not that interested in art history, so those reasons may be why I didn’t get it. I saw a lot of praise for this book, about how it was life changing, but I feel like I only got like few new perspectives from the whole thing.

I also finished Persepolis recently and I enjoyed it, but I did not love it.

If I’m being honest, I tend to be the type of person who isn’t into non fics, poetry, essays, graphic novels, analysis. It makes me feel immature and dumb to admit it but that’s just what it is.

- girls posting about dating older men more (guilty)

- more and more discourse about “poor people shouldn’t have kids”

- young people joining run clubs and church

- rise of more useless acronyms like NEET NIMBY PMC LARP

- generation blaming like Gen Z can’t do shit, boomers are why trump won, millennials Gen X caused blah blah

- literacy crisis but also the flip side, a middle class and educated population continuing to read (spicy readers are something else tho)

- littering, or garbage cans that are filled to the brim

- rise of using Facebook for the marketplace and roommates

- irrationally negative content and comments online; associated with rise in virtue signaling

- locked up cvs items

- extreme frugal or hedonistic content creation (day trip to china, how to spend $0 in nyc, only ubering food, one month in Switzerland)

- reboots of old shows and movies like clueless

Seems like I don’t have enough karma to post on bayside so I’m going to have to post here

Hi, this morning, my dad and I were parked by 212th st and 42nd ave. We were observing a guy walking his two dogs, a big white pit bull and a tiny pug. A few moments later, someone ran out of a white Honda, and pulled open the door of a nearby black Cadillac. The dog guy immediately reacted to the attempted thief, and the thief ran back to the white Honda, and left with his accomplice.

Hoping this reaches the dog guy. We have the footage of it all going down.

A month ago I read discontent by beatriz serrano. The plot summary is about this woman who is addicted to YouTube and hates her advertising job, her coworkers, has a decently good life other than that. In the plot the main character runs into an old friend who looks completely different now and at a work retreat the main character spikes the drinks of her coworkers to make her speech more interesting.

I initially liked it because the main character was similar to me- in a pointless advertising job and addicted to video content. But then I realized the entire book was based on relatability. Like a bunch of lines are about how the MC wants to kill herself rather than come in, how everyone in the corporate world is pretending, how her coworkers have no brains. After a hundred pages of this it felt overdone.

I’m not saying I hated the book, but I finished it without really getting anything new out of it. It felt like reading a bunch of tweets or having a convo from someone who regurgitates viral internet phrases. Idk maybe I’m being too harsh but it seemed like the only appeal was the relatability aspect (and honestly was marketed as such by online book recommenders).

Before I say anything else, I KNOW DOING THIS IS AWFUL but for the love of god just listen. This is my first relationship EVER, and it’s also his. I am 22f and he is 26m. We live in New York City and met thru hinge. He comes from a poor/lower middle class family and my family is middle class. My bf has a cs degree and works for an ai company which pays him for every project he does, so he makes 50k annually. I have a corporate job that pays 66k. We are both likely on the autism spectrum, him more than me. We both live with our parents in the outer boroughs, both only children. And we’re both Asian if that’s relevant (well he is wasian and I lived in a mostly white suburb for a few years so we’re uncultured). We’ve been dating since feb or march.

Yesterday, I went to his house for the first time and met his parents. It was a very run down, like I’m talking about roaches, no sunlight, and insane hoarder home. His bed was a bunk bed with the bed on the ceiling, mattress is inches away. The weirdest part (I’ll admit he warned me) is that his parents are married but don’t interact with each other. Basically his house is 2 different apartments. His dad lives on the left apartment, and his mother is on the right . You’d have to exit the one apartment, go outside to enter the other, meaning his parents are living like neighbors/strangers and can go a long time without interacting. His mom was sitting in the room with the most sunlight when I arrived, and she looked very unwell. Her greeting was very minimal like “hello” but she also said “I know this place is small and dirty”. Then she didn’t say anything else to me. We left this apartment, went out, and went to his dad’s side. He was laying down in his undershirt, and was a little more friendly but overall closed off. Both parents looked like they haven’t been outside for a long time. Also other rooms in the house had serious issues like leakage, mold, and deteriorating wood, and the sink for handwashing would dump drainage water into the bath tub. Boxes and blankets were all over the house, along with random figurines like a collection of Chinese or Japanese geisha dolls. Many objects seemed like they were untouched and uncleaned for years. The entire place was just really musty and creepy, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a house like this.

The overall experience put me off guard. I didn’t expect his parents to be this secluded and quiet, barely interacting with each other, their son, or me. And I know it is wrong to judge someone’s home but I truly can’t fathom being in an insanely disorganized house with bugs everywhere for over 3 decades and not do anything. And i know my parents would look down at his parents over this.

I’m not bitching about my boyfriend’s uncontrollable aspects of life. He has always been a gentleman and paid for everything, which now makes me feel guilty. As we became official he started talking more about how a lot of places are expensive here, but he did not bother to look for another job in order to afford living on his own. Like he’s just been doing that ai training gig for the past 2 years. I also noticed an autism gap where my bf misses a lot of cues, wander off without telling me when we are exploring a place, and he doesn’t seem to take amazing care of his hygiene. There was also an incident where he got scammed out of $500 on Facebook marketplace. Like it was the most obvious scam ever, FB also blatantly warns you about the scam where someone needs your Venmo to be ungraded to a business acc and whatever. I told him I understood how he got roped into it, but it is a sign to worry about his financial literacy and overall decision making. A week later his dad fell for an unrelated scam where he ended up giving a stranger his debit card.

So to conclude this schizo post, I can’t get over the house and his parents, and I feel like the money gap and autism gap is also a wedge between us. You can say “you love your partner for them, not their family or their home” all you want but we know that’s a cope-lie. Anyway if considering dumping him over this makes me a judgmental, classist, hypocritical bitch, then so be it.

So a year ago I interviewed for some positions at penguin random house and harpercollins. I was FRESH out of undergrad and I did not have publishing experience at all, which they could see from my resume. But I interned in a big media company, the library, and wrote a lot, so I was given a chance for some interviews.

And guess what the pay was in June 2025? 50,000

I ultimately didn’t get those jobs but now I work somewhere that pays me 66,000. I recently saw the exact same PRH position was open again and this time the role paid 55,000. Knowing what I know now, I was astonished at how anyone could survive off of 50-55k here.

I looked at some other roles w publishing companies and it was blackpilling. 3-7 years of experience gets you a salary of 60-80k if you’re lucky (insanely lucky).

I’m just trying to see if anyone else recalls or has their own stories, but I swear that people have been calling out Phia and Phoebe Gates YEARS AGO. Like I remember seeing TikTok’s about how Phoebe was lurking on instagram, watching every story to see what people were saying about her and Phia. And also I’ve recently been seeing how Phoebe would DM people asking to say they found their clothes via Phia (aka LYING).

Not to mention all the influencers here who are supposedly invested or sponsoring Phia, none of them give a fuck lmao.

For example in my teens I browsed the childfree sub because back then, I was convinced I was going to be child free in my future. And by extension I browsed the antinatalism sub, because it was recommended to me, and all these people had a negative view of life that they pushed onto other people.

But I took a break from Reddit and these subs for a while, but I still held onto my beliefs about how reproduction is stupid. Obviously a few years passed and I went to college, got a job, etc and I no longer hold onto depressing antinatalist views, but remained child free.

However, it seemed like a lot of people on the internet, especially young people, have gotten sucked into the same pipeline as I did. I mainly see these people commenting on other platforms saying “where is the girl with the list” (context, some girl on TikTok has a list of reasons not to have kids). The comments came off as unnecessary and weirdly degrading towards pregnant women.

I’m really glad I matured past that point, otherwise I would’ve been commenting shit like “this is what you get for getting pregnant”. Anyway I’m not sure what this antinatalist pipeline is called but I’m glad I naturally pulled myself out.

I had a weird high school experience so I never read Mice and Men, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and even though I was required to read The Great Gatsby, I just didn’t do it. I read animal farm on my own accord though.

Anyway my plan for the distant future is to read Gatsby, and also Virginia Woolf, and I’ll get to Steinbeck and 1984 when I get there.

You will never escape the weekly Sunday scaries post about someone considering quitting their job, the ugh fuck it’s mon,tues,wed slop, the “has anyone considered giving up and starting their own business” rumination.

In summary the job market is awful. Anyways, tgif.

Sorry but it’s fucking weird to me when people online and sometimes irl insist you are EITHER good at maths/sci or literature/history, but NOT BOTH. Meanwhile being excellent at both is common. Another common one I see if “people who peaked in high school struggle afterwards” which also isn’t true. They usually excel in college and corporate.

To piggyback off another post on this sub, the OP said being poor made them a boring person. While I disagree with OPs perspective, a lot of people in the comments were insisting that poor people are more interesting, more accepting, and have more diverse experiences than rich people when in reality, this is also not true. You are interesting or accepting based on what you are exposed to and what you choose to expose yourself to later in life. Being poor sucks, but it doesn’t mean your life is automatically boring but it also doesn’t mean you’re a more accepting person. I’ve grown up seeing poor people stick within their own race forever, while a lot of rich people were able to be more liberal and accepting. Also, the experiences of poverty is not entirely a unique story. Yes we both waited for shitty buses because we couldn’t afford uber, yes both of our families walked to the laundromat because we couldn’t afford a car, etc etc.

Overall my point is that some people need to just give proper advice or consolation without resorting to no-correlation cope. For example “yes I understand you struggled in high school, but hopefully you will have better experiences later in life with people you connect with” or “your life is what you make of it”

So I can stay home and rot on my toilet.

Just ruminating cuz this is high risk and low reward, and I’ll probs never have the funds for it, ever.

Location: In Queens, somewhere close to Brooklyn and not that far from manhattan. Probably in Long Island city, in a walkable distance from book culture but not that close. Close to a park and cafe with good foot traffic.

How to acquire books: probably gonna take in donations and find overstocked books somehow. Heard visiting estate sales is a good way too.

Finding employees: shouldn’t be too hard.

Finding customers: probably more difficult given the illiteracy crisis but the plan would be to do some heavy social media marketing and some kind of discount or rewards program. In addition will prob list books on eBay or some other place.

Pricing: based on quality, demand, and rarity of the book. Hopefully like $3-$13 for most books.

Payment: cash for no tax inc, credit card with tax.

Events: if it’s not a hole in a wall store or on a minuscule block, would definitely do events like book launches or art shows

Other shit I could sell: I know places like sweet pickle books sells pickles and other pickle themed stuff. I’ll probably team with a local cafe or adoption center and sell cat themed stuff if it were up to me.

Yes I’d rather be conversing with a robot than acknowledge the fact that I have the same voting power as someone who cannot critically think and leaves nasty comments past the age of 27.