July 27, 2023, 4:23pm
Today, the anonymous Instagram account xoxopublishinggg, which shared memes and anonymous tips about books and the publishing industry, announced via their stories that they “will be going on hiatus with stories,” apparently effective immediately. “It is our two year anniversary today and 97 weeks since we asked for best cry spaces,” they wrote, “and our thumbs and hearts have grown weary over the months of cropping anon goss to share.” They invited followers to keep venting and “sending fodder for meme materials,” and noted “we’ll be back here or there if it seems like we are needed.”
“In the meantime,” they wrote, “we hope you’ll keep building community with each other, online but especially irl. We need unions and gossip networks and spaces for collective action to protect us. Please keep actively reaching out to each other, across departments, generations, places of work, because all of our HRs and executive teams suck. If anything, the last few years of reading DMs has shown that most of the community is generous, kind, and concerned about keeping each other as safe as possible.”
“Some of it is feeling like we’ve perhaps effected the maximum change that we are able to do at this time, and that doing what we do on a daily basis is unsustainable for a small team with full time jobs in publishing,” they told Publishers Lunch when asked for further comment.
Thank you for your service, anonymous Instagrammers of most excellent fancy. (Don’t abandon us, publishersbrunch.)