The Reader Inside of Me: A look into a budding publishers personality

August 13, 2013 | News about
• InkWell Management

A: A and I have known each other for years. You might say that he started it all. He is my oldest friend, lax nearly to a fault, a decidedly fun guy, easily charmed and infinitely patient. He handles all the casual stuff. He glances at menus and skims newspaper articles for me, luxuriates in novels (and tries, whenever he can, to read them on the beach), attempts to make sense of the phonetic translations on the back of the fortune cookie slips that offer to help me “learn Chinese.” When someone finally sends me a message in letters scrawled across the sky by the contrail of an airplane, A will be there, soaking it in.

B: B showed up sometime around the beginning of my freshman year of high school. I certainly didn’t invite him to the party, but I can’t deny that he’s a handy fellow to keep around. He’s grown on me slowly over the past eight years.. He is stuffy and literary, cerebral beyond reason, stuck, most of the time, in his own head. He’s an analyst obsessed with productivity. (In fact he’s collaborating with A, right now, in typing this post.) He does all my critical work, and composes each of my essays. I love him—though, admittedly, he is terrible with dinner conversation.

C: For many years, I thought that A and B were it—two halves of my reading whole. As my time at InkWell as a summer intern concludes, a new character has introduced himself. He’s C, and he is my businessman. C is categorically no-nonsense in his style of thinking. He looks at a manuscript and sees it for its potential. He is aware of market trends. He understands that YA historical may be a tough sell, whereas YA fantasy practically sells itself; for the time being at least.He has a grudging admiration for the authors that have developed a consistent and sustainable formula for writing novels and can’t help but want to tap into the action. He is a methodical artist. B hates him. A can understand where he’s coming from but nevertheless, keeps a healthy distance. I never knew, never in a thousand years would have guessed, that I had him in me. I’m immensely thankful that he’s been brought to light.

Welcome to the team, C.

{Andrew Weaver was a Summer intern here at InkWell Management. He is a rising Senior at Middlebury College and the genius behind the InkWell caricatures.}