It began seriously just before 2008's holiday season with many layoffs and restructuring in publishing companies across the spectrum: trade, educational, mass market. The wider economic turmoil affected us all. Often it was the brightest and best in the trade book market who lost their jobs! It was truly frightening from every perspective. This situation has stabilized a bit, but everyone is still very skittish.

Then the educational market just stopped for all intensive purposes….and hasn't really resurfaced! Traditionally this market is a big hunk of on going available assignments for most artists! In an attempt to cut down on costs, too many already low paying jobs have been assigned 'off shore' (often India). This is a shameful loss for artists that will be hard to reverse. The economy's downward spiral has caused state budgets cut and cut again. Thus the school and library markets have much less to spend and this further impacts both educational and trade industries. By dangling Federal stimulus grants, the government is pushing the school markets to go digital …. Totally! Text books as we know them are 'out.' This has caused a good deal of the 'stall' in the educational publishers' product production. Assignments are delayed as they try to figure out what this new 'multi-platform environment' will mean...

In spite of all this, I don't think we need to be all 'doom and gloom' about the changes happening in OUR industry. Life must always change; it just seems a bit more rapid and obvious these days. The question is…what can WE do about it?

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